Assembly Standing Committee on Agriculture

Good morning. Can you guys hear me? I don't know. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our joint informational hearing. We're gonna get started in a few minutes. I do want to thank everyone who was here early and those of you who arrived right on time.

We are running a little bit behind because we want to make sure that our other Members who are on their way, either were stuck in traffic but are making their way, which I think they should be arriving in the next few minutes, can join us here on the dais. But again, thank you so much for being here.

We will start in a few minutes. Prime good morning. Well, we'll ask folks to do our first panelist, if you guys can start taking a seat so that we can get started in about two minutes.

So right now, before we begin, we want to take a photo with the panelists so that we don't have to do this at the end. So if we can just have all the panelists come to the front and we will be taking a quick picture. Good morning, everyone, and welcome.

I want to thank all of you for joining us for this important joint informational hearing on groundwater recharge. I'd like to thank assemblywoman and Chairwoman Papinous, her staff, along with the Assembly Agriculture Committee staff, for all their work putting today's hearing together.

I also want to thank our staff, who is in the back, who has come early to make sure that all the technology works and that we can actually publicly hold this hearing and be able to televise it.

I also want to thank our panelists and the General public for being here today to discuss groundwater recharge issues in the state. Before we begin, let me just quickly address some logistical items for this hearing. Any Member of the public is welcome to submit written comments to the AG Committee through email. There's an email agri.comittee@assembly.ca.Gov. The email address can also be found on our website, which is at https://agri.assembly.ca.gov Again, welcome everyone.

As many of you know, while the Agriculture Committee does not have direct jurisdiction over water issues, nevertheless, the issues of the Ag Committee does cover and are interlinked with water availability, supply and reliability. Our central valley is often referred as the breadbasket of the world, and for good reason.

Especially the folks that are in this room know that California's agricultural economy is the leading agricultural producer in the United States, providing over a third of the country's vegetables and two thirds of its fruits and nuts. Our state's unique climate allows for diverse crop production over 400 different commodities.

In fact, my district, Assembly District 27, is home to some of the most productive lands in the state. The economic impact of our agricultural economy contributes billions of dollars to the state economy and is key in maintaining California's position as the fifth largest economy in the world.

Additionally, our agricultural economy employs hundreds of thousands thousands of workers, particularly in rural areas. Families like the one I grew up in rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. While agriculture plays a key role in feeding the nation, driving our state's economy and providing jobs, it also relies and is dependent on having water.

Water is indispensable for our agriculture economy. It is the lifeblood of our region's economy, but is its scarcity and management are increasingly critical issues that affect food production, the economy and the environment.

As a chair of Agriculture Committee, I've had the opportunity to meet with growers, tour dozens of farms, and hear from water districts and countless other stakeholders involved in powering our agricultural economy. The one consistent theme I hear over and over again is water. We need water.

Effective water supply reliability and management is essential to ensure agriculture can meet current and future food demands in both a changing climate and projected water shortages. I look forward to having a productive discussion on the State of our groundwater policies, you know, including SGMA, its benefits, challenges and opportunities.

There is growing interest in how the state can help or expound groundwater recharge projects. These projects take advantage of wet years to replenish California's aquifers in years like 2023 last year, where we had atmospheric rivers and flooding.

Having a better plan and policies to move water efficiently and effectively can help mitigate flooding disasters and at the same time protect the environment. While recharge is a useful way to put surface water back underground, it's not the silver bullet for California's water challenges.

I still believe we need above groundwater storage, but hopefully groundwater recharge can become a stronger tool to help address the water crisis in the state. After all, we need water for ag, but we also need water for other things like to build homes.

Today's hearings would not be possible without the partnership and cooperation of our Assembly Water Parks and and Wildlife Committee, which has primary jurisdiction over water issues. Again, I want to thank my colleague and the Chairwoman Papin for her partnership in holding this important Joint Hearing on water.

I also want to thank my colleagues who have made the trip from their districts down in the South Valley, Assemblymember Mathis, previously also the Vice Chair of the Agriculture Committee, reminding us that he's on his last few months of the job. But he's still here, so we're grateful for his participation.

And also Assemblywoman Schiavo , who represents a district in the south part of California out by Santa Clarita. So we want to thank her for making the time and obviously the Chairwoman, for agreeing to have this Joint Hearing and for traveling from the bay to be here. Thank you so much. And, Chairwoman, I'll pass it on to you.

Yes. Oh, there we go. I've never not been heard. Whether I need a microphone is questionable. Well, I'm so delighted to be here. So well put, Assembly Member Soria, thank you for convening this special hearing. I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of recharging groundwater and the importance that it has on agriculture.

It is with our increasing climate impacts and the swings that we have from atmospheric rivers to drought, the ability to harness excess water is becoming more and more important.

Now, I come from San Mateo County, very suburban area, but my interest is in serving on the Water Committee, and being chair of the Water Committee is kind of twofold. Number one, I come out of local government much like Assembly Member Soria, and infrastructure kind of makes my heart go pitter-patter.

And where I come from, I happen to come from the most vulnerable community in the state of California to sea level rise. And we're right along the bay, right near San Francisco Airport. And part and parcel of that is a lot of biotech that keeps the economy going, a lot of tech that keeps the economy going.

They are all very vulnerable to sea level rise. They go under, we will go under economically. So that was a large part of why I wanted to serve on this Committee, and I enjoy very much being chair, but that's just one district, certainly in California.

So I'm honored to be here and talk about the role that water and water capture is going to play as it relates to Ag, which is also such a big part of our economy in this fifth largest economy in the world.

So, given the work that we've been doing in the Legislature on this topic of late, it's clear we don't quite have alignment with all of the things that we do need to accomplish as these atmospheric rivers and the drought keep coming in cyclical fashion to us.

So we haven't, you know, there's a lot of policy framework and incentives to make groundwater recharge sort of happen at scale.

So I'm really hopeful that in holding this hearing and hearing from witnesses that are on the ground really involved in these things, how we can improve upon capturing water recharging, and how we can be ready for drought when and if, I guess, when it comes the next time. So I look forward to hearing from all the witnesses.

I want to thank you in advance, my colleagues who also made the trek. I couldn't be more delighted with your interest in being here. And with that, I'll turn it over to either one of you. We'll let Assembly Member Schiavo go first, and then we'll hear from Assembly Member Mathis. Well, look at that, and Madeira, and Merced.

We have all kinds of microphones. Where am I today?

Good morning. I'm Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo. As Chair Soria said, I represent Santa Fe in the north San Fernando Valley. And while I also come from a more urban area, we have the only existing natural river left in Southern California, San River running through our district.

Okay, well, use that. Okay. We do.

So I'm Pilar Schiavo, Assembly Member for the Santa Clarita Valley and the north San Fernando Valley, which also more urban, but also we have the, you know, the last natural river, the Santa Clara river, running through our district, a critical river and resource for our community in Southern California.

And we, you know, we focus a lot, obviously, in Southern California, where we don't get a lot of rain and have a lot of resources ourselves on figuring out how we can do even more to recharge and capture, and especially in our wonderful water table in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valley, which we've done a lot to clean up.

The water table in the San Fernando Valley, which had been contaminated, still is contaminated. And so I want to thank the chairs, though, for their leadership on this. Chair Papan has taken the reins of our Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee and done a lot of great work this year.

And I know Chair Soria has just, since day one, hit the ground running in Sacramento and done so much incredible advocacy for her community, both in the Ag space and around all of the resources that are needed here.

And so really grateful to have her partnership on so many important issues and have been sitting here with Assembly Member Mathis my whole time on Water, Parks and Wildlife. So this is probably our last Committee hearing. So wonderful to see you here. And his commitment doesn't stop. So happy to be here.

I don't want to take up a long time for comments, but looking forward to hearing from the panelists. Thank you.

All right, I'm Assembly Member Devon Mathis. My district was ground zero for the droughts. My hometown, Porterville, was the city without water. That was over 10 years ago. And I know we're talking about SGMA today and 10 years of SGMA and where we've gotten to.

We also need to really look at the impacts that water has on Agriculture, especially in the San Joaquin Valley. One in four jobs is Ag, one in four. And when you multiply that out to the families, you know, husband wife, 2.5 kids.

You got to remember that person that works in the fields, that works in ag production, their husband, their wife, their spouse works in town, law enforcement, teacher, drugstore, whatever, works in town. So when we lose agricultural jobs, you're not just losing the job, you're losing the community. You're losing those entire families.

I know in my district, just in Tulare County, it's like 40,000 jobs. And then you multiply that out, now you got 120,000 people displaced. When you lose those jobs, that's bigger than the city we're in today. That's Merced wiped off the map. That's Visalia wiped off the map.

If we lose just the jobs in a single county, where do those people go? And it all comes down to water. And as mentioned, we have atmospheric rivers that we know are going to happen. We have these cycles. We used to call it El Nino, La Nina.

We know we have to clean up our watershed, and we talk about that with forest fire management, with getting the trees out. We talk about that with cleaning up the watershed. We got into that the last couple of years, talking about reintroduction of beavers into the Sierra Nevadas.

And we saw that happen with the Tule River tribe just a few months ago. But we have to clean up the watershed. We have to capture the water. 10 years ago, there was a water bomb passed, and we still don't have, it's flat anymore, and Shasta just got rejected.

We have to capture every single drop we can, and that's still not being done. And then we get into the conveyance problem, water out the delta, but we have to get water south. And we know this. We look at the maps. I mean, it's Sacramento Valley has a ton of water, San Joaquin Valley doesn't.

And we have to get water here through improving our watershed and through our conveyance system. And we've been doing that. We've been fixing the canals. Friant-Kern Canal, we've been fixing that, but it's not done yet. And we can talk about, we need to get more water into the ground. We need to get more water into the ground.

But until we're capturing it and moving it here where it needs to be, I look forward to hearing from the panelists on what your plans are to improve that, because that's the problem in the system, is we have water in the north, and we don't have water in the central part.

And that doesn't even get into the problem with Colorado River water and the Deadpool scenario. That's being discussed, too, and what LA and everybody else is doing, what Schiavo's district has to worry about, what Orange County and LA County have to worry about. And I know we're doing trade-offs there.

We're doing trade offs with Arizona and other partners on getting water to the southern part of the state. But here in the San Joaquin Valley, we don't have that dense population. We're not metropolitan. So we're not looked at the same way.

But I encourage you on the state regulation side to look at the San Joaquin Valley not just as a place where, oh, the food is grown here, but these are lives, these are families. There's a culture here, and we grow the food for the whole world. We're the fifth-largest economy in the world.

And, you know, there's a saying, you go anywhere else in the country, even up in Canada, and they talk about how agriculture runs Wall Street. Ag is the number one GDP everywhere else, except for in California, because we have Hollywood, because we have tech, we have all these other things.

Even though California Ag is number one, we produce more agriculture here in this valley than anywhere else on the planet. And we treat it like a redheaded stepchild, and we take it for granted. And we need to stop doing that. We need to start focusing on getting the water resources here where they need to be.

You know, this area would grow, it would thrive if we simply put our heads around getting the water resources here where they need to be. On focusing on, we can meet these groundwater recharge goals if the water flew was south. We know that, the data is there.

So I look forward to hearing from the panelists on how we're going to do that. And I might be retiring here in a few months. You all keep dragging me back. I keep saying this is my last hearing, and yet here we are again.

So I'm going to continue to advocate for this, whether I'm in office or nothing. And we need to, we've been saying it since I was a kid, so I'm tired. I want to see it happen because we have the ability, we have the technology, we even have the water.

It's just a matter of willpower from the state to make it happen. Thank you.

Thank you to all my colleagues for your opening remarks. We will move to our first panel, which will provide an overview of groundwater recharge, state and local programs and projects. I would first like to introduce our first panelist to speak, professor for civil and environmental engineering from UC Merced, Josué Medellín-Azuara.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning. Chair Soria, Chair Papan, and Assembly Members Schiavo and Mathis, thank you very much for your opening remarks and for the opportunity to speak before you. And I'm faculty at UC Merced and I've been a member since 2017, so I'm advancing the slides here. Yeah, no, not going. Okay.

There you go. Okay. So I will start with groundwater, and I will begin by saying that groundwater is no other thing than other surface water. It was water that was once in the atmosphere and enters the ground as rain or snow to fill the underground pores to form aquifers.

Driven by soil properties and differences in pressure, gravity and pressure. Groundwater in aquifers varies in age and can go from hours to hundreds of years. Groundwater supplies between 30% and 60% of California's water needs for agriculture and communities amounts to 12 to 23 million acres of food, depending on the surface water availability in a specific year.

The map on the right shows you the breakdown by a hydrologic region of how much is fulfilled by groundwater. Another thing that I would like to make a remark on is also the largest water storage volume available to us.

We can storage from 850 to 1.3 thousand million acre food compared to just 50 in our reservoirs and about 15 in the snowpack, according to information from the Department of Water Resources Bulletin. It is also a common property resource, meaning that it's extremely hard to manage and exclude users.

But one user's use of groundwater affects other users. So this leads to the tragedy of commons in an economic sense. Okay, trying to move here. Thank you. So major water groundwater challenges for us are, currently we have a chronic overdraft. 2 million acre of food per year needs to be fulfilled by 2040 following the SGMA regulations.

Subsidence is also, as it was mentioned by some of our Assembly Members, is affecting infrastructure conveyance, infrastructure that has costly repairs and also creates some problems for flood management. Dry domestic wells in places like Porterville, as it was mentioned, are affecting many other populations in the Central Valley. Also, the issues with saline intrusion affecting water quality increases.

The treatment cost for coastal cities is also our current problem. And there's an increase in hardened demand from permanent crops and also forage crops that support downstream sectors, which constitute a big proportion of our agricultural revenue in the state. Future challenges include warmer temperatures.

We are expecting to see a raise in temperature and therefore higher evapotranspiration during the last drought. We estimate two to four more inches of water needed to be applied in crops to fulfill this gap. In a higher demand from the soil moisture deficit and also antecedent conditions and just a higher evaporation into the atmosphere.

We will have precipitation volatility. As it was mentioned, in the past decade we saw two multi year droughts in two of the we have these cyclic climate extremes.

Fortunately, we have SGMA that is limiting pumping to reach balance by 2040 and the threat of sea level rise that was mentioned by Chair Papan and Chair Schiavo is definitely a problem that will require having higher outflows and determines or keep away saline intrusion into our coastal aquifers. Next one please, if I can.

Okay, so ending overdraft will come at a cost. So the map on the left shows some work I quoted in the past with the Public Policy Institute of California out of Bulletin 18 on the high priority basins for the groundwater sustainability plan.

And the charts on the right shows you a variety of options to achieve this close this gap of 2 million acre foot by year 2040 by following a combination of supply and demand options. Supply augmentation options include aquifer recharge, also surface water increases and the demand management options include stress irrigation and also markets and land idling.

You can see that groundwater recharge together with some water transfer can help reduce this gap in groundwater overdraft and also help reduce the agricultural losses and the employment losses depending on how we do this. Next one please. Demand management and supply augmentation options are portrayed in this chart.

You can see that the lion share is on the top for groundwater recharge to fulfill the gap. It comes at various cost brackets. There's definitely some recharge that is mostly than other. Also there are shown some other options at a higher cost including the surface water increase in reservoirs. Next one please.

Yeah. So aquifer recharge has been, has occurred in California over several decades. So there's several methods in which this occurs. I list here a few from a recent report from a Public Policy Institute of California on statement of replenishment.

So, one method is diversions to river beds and canals that occurs in areas in which there's an opportunity to spread water there and using riverbeds. Also, we have farmland in an open space that is becoming more common. We have seen some examples in which flooding some fields has not affected yields significantly.

And so this is expanding in lewd recharge, which consists of essentially switching to surface water, particularly in wet years. Use of dedicated recharge basin is the method that achieves the most recharge, the highest recharge rate and the highest volume, and also use of storm basins, that is, in cities in which this storm water capture basins.

They are also the function of recharging the aquifers well injection that is also called an aquifer storage recovery system that requires pressurizing water to get into the aquifer that can be a little bit more energy intensive, but is used in areas in which the soil conductivity on the top layer is relatively Low.

Also, water under cropland, that's an emerging method, is not very common and the contribution is relatively Low. Offside recharge is also an alternative for places that do not have the local conditions to conduct recharge in an economic costly, in a cost effective way.

It is estimated by some researchers at UC Davis that 2.6 million acres foot of water is available in years with a high magnitude flow. Those occur about seven in 10 years in the Sacramento Valley and 4.7 in the San Joaquin Valley out of 10 years.

Some more conservative estimates put there from DWR indicate about 0.9 million acre foot of recharge in the Central Valley. Next one, please. Okay, so manashed aquifer recharge in the San Joaquin Valley. There's some good reasons here for hope. So. Between 2017 and 2023, there was an increase in the amount of water recharged to 1.3 million acre foot.

We also have that accounting and crediting systems locally helped bolster this recharge, along with Executive orders. You can see in the chart on the bottom what are the relatively contribution of each method to the aquifer recharge.

Also, some of the areas in the maps on the top that are affected or by overdraft more also have the best conditions for recharge. Following the UC Davis Sacville index for recharge, some challenges remain, of course. Sometimes there's no infrastructure. Some systems are not meant to or not designed to run on the opposite direction.

Usually that creates some challenges. Cost can also be significant. Also we have the risk of saturation at the time in which we can conduct recharge. A lot of the soil is saturated and that creates some flood risk in some areas.

Permitting and definitely is a frequent mentioned barrier for recharge and also the reliability on accounting and credit systems for the farming. So some promising solutions on the research side. So on the left we see a map of flooding. This is done in collaboration with my colleague Professor Hester at UC Merced and Professor Dalkey and UC Davis.

We use satellite information from Sentinel one, Sentinel two that can penetrate the cloud cover and detect flooding in the surface. So that allow us to see the potential of a recharge just by the number of days of flooding and well identify the economic damage to. On the right we see map on drought.

That's the extent of areas affected by idling land and that can provide us also some information on areas that are vulnerable to idle land and that can benefit from having recharged basins or arrange transfers from offsite recharge or other water transfers. So other promising solutions. So markets, measurement and management.

So there's say that we cannot manage what we cannot measure. Recently, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz were designated agricultural experimental stations and the map on the top shows the place in which we will have our experimental farm with some rendering on the bottom.

This is led by Professors Beers and Harmon and they are leading some recharge experiments in our farm. The map on the right the figure on the right shows you use of electromagnetic, transient electromagnetic technology that can penetrate the soil layers and create a high-resolution profile of soil conductivity.

Soil conductivity is one key parameter to determine cost effectiveness of recharge in several areas and this was done in collaboration with Stanford University Professor Knight. Also, the figure in the center shows you the change over time on vegetation indexes that can provide a proxy for crop productivity and water use. Having accurate water balances is fundamental.

So another option here for research is we cannot achieve the 2.2 million acre foot of deficit by just recharge. Some land idling is inevitable. So we are creating some tools that overlay suitability of recharge, value of agriculture and employment, environmental risk mitigation, potential conservation efforts, renewal, energy production.

We overlay those suitability into a web based tool for harvest. Stakeholders looking to options as we arrange, as we plan for ending overdraft and also report for some land in a collaborative way. Next one. So some management solutions. At the state level we have rules and permittings and transfer.

So there's rules exist for a good reason and we have to be through in setting those by the state and the agencies. At the local level, accounting and crediting systems are of helpful to just motivate recharge by farming and other entities. Also what infrastructure projects are needed and funding for those infrastructure projects is definitely crucial.

So for recharge basins and technological tools as the ones I mentioned. So groundwater recharge remains one of the most promising and less costly ways of securing climate resilience. Permitting rules, accounting and credits are essential for motivating recharge projects and infrastructure needs.

Some solid funding research tools can facilitate this planning for research projects through measurement, repurposing markets and accounting. And with that, I conclude my presentation.

Thank you so much Professor Medellin-Azuara for that presentation. We will continue with our next two panelists and then after the first set of panelists, we will open it up to questions for my colleagues and here the Assemblymembers.

So next I'd like to invite Tim Godwin, he's Technical and Policy Advisor to the Deputy Director of Sustainable Water Management and Ajay Goyal, Manager, Department of Water Resources Statewide Infrastructure Investigations Branch.

Good morning. Thank you very much for having us here today. Chair Soria, Chair Papan, Assembly Members, I'm Tim Godwin. I serve as advisor to Deputy Director Paul Gosselin, who oversees the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act Implementation for the Department. I don't want to talk a lot about SGMA.

I think we're all aware SGMA is 10 years old and a day now. So I think the saying goes is this is the end of the beginning of SGMA. Now comes the hard part. And this is about implementing these projects and actions that these local agencies have worked hard to establish and define their plans.

And I want to compliment all of the groundwater sustainability agencies out there. One, they all formed on time and completely covering the state where required. And then two, they established the hardest part, developing a groundwater sustainability plan that really met the call of avoiding and eliminating overdraft and addressing subsidence conditions.

Those two factors alone within SGMA, we talk about the undesirable results. Those two factors are called out explicitly in the intent of SGMA that need to be addressed. The subsidence is having a significant impact on our infrastructure and ability to move water around the state to Assemblymember's Mathis' point so we're working hard to address those issues.

And I know the local agencies are anxious to really effectuate some of these recharge projects. So every groundwater sustainability plan out there is calling in some capacity for some recharge component to address their overdraft or future conditions of sustainable groundwater. That's a really important part.

They're looking at the supply augmentation side to really help us weather the extreme swinging door, if you will, between our flood conditions and our drought conditions. SGMA was born out of drought. We saw a lot of dry wells. We saw increased subsidence. We saw a lot of impacted agriculture. Our reservoirs were empty.

And we were facing a third year. In this last, most recent drought. We were looking at another year of drought and really starting to get worried. And we'll start to talk about some of the actions we tried to implement here to support that. Instead, we got a flood, we got 23. We saw the recurrence of Tulare Lake.

That's amazing. And I want to highlight that the Administration has really focused on this and found ways to try and, and really effectuate actions in a very timely manner to the extent possible. So with groundwater, I mean, the whole system is out of sight. It's hard for people to grasp what those conditions are.

Professor Medellin-Azuara pointed out that our groundwater system is the largest storage reservoir at our disposal right now. It's under our feet. Problem is, it takes time to fill it, it takes space to fill it, and it takes water to fill it. And we're going to work on that. And we've been working on that.

So I just wanted to highlight that. You know, so much of our extremes have really fed into our transition to our changing climate and trying to adapt. We've developed. The administration's acknowledged that through a series of actions, the development of the water resiliency portfolio, the governor's water supply strategy, the development of the groundwater Management act.

What we're also looking into now is many of our other planning projects. So the flood protection plans that are out there, we need to start to correlate much more closely with those agencies that are responsible for managing our floodwaters, to capture and work with our water agencies that are looking to distribute these waters, to get those into storage storage, either in surface water reservoirs through revisions and operations, or into our groundwater system through recharge projects.

I think was also pointed out earlier was the establishment of several Executive orders from the last drought into this flood season and the quick transition, we went from trying to buffer against more dry domestic wells, more dry public supply wells and more impacts, to quickly trying to capture and store those waters. So the Department has been focused.

We've been given two tasks under SGMA, one being that of regulator and review of the groundwater sustainability plans. But two is assistance. And we've been pushing very hard on that front. We've been advancing a lot of technical assistance, both within the SGMA program, but also across the Department.

We're looking at watershed studies, really looking higher into these systems outside of the basins. Where is the water coming from? When is it coming to? What volumes are we seeing move through these systems? And then within SGMA, we've been really advancing how do we characterize these groundwater basins? We know it's a rate issue.

The water comes fast and furious. Groundwater recharges slow. It's slow because where we see the water is in our flood plains, where we have fine grained sediments that, that limit the ability for those waters to flow into the subsurface.

We've conducted a statewide survey using aerial electromagnetic geophysics that is really helping us to look deep into these aquifers, really finding those prime pathways for us to put water and have it recharge at very high rates. So we're going to try and focus in on identifying those key recharge areas to take the big gulp when it's available.

The other things we've been really working on is really looking at the planning assistance and regulatory assistance. We've been working with our partners at the State Board, CDFW, also working with federal agencies, talking about how we can collaborate on and recharge projects and really get the biggest bang for our buck.

Every dollar that's going out there, we're trying to stretch as far as we can to implement as much recharge projects as we can. The Executive orders in particular cleared a pathway for us to expedite and suspend CEQA under certain circumstances for certain recharge projects that took all of the grant dollars that were awarded to those agencies and made them effective immediately.

We also tried to find ways to help those agencies prepare the lands to better receive those flood waters, as well as providing some temporary pumps and actions to capture those waters. That I'll touch on later. But the financial assistance, I think, is profound.

The Legislature saw fit to provide more than $483 million in grants across multiple funding sources to support approximately 390 recharge specific projects in these groundwater sustainability plans. That's amazing. I mean, that's a lot of work. Those projects are in various degrees of implementation.

So I'll point out, we talk about SGMA being 10 years old, but the groundwater sustainability plans are only two years old. The first groundwater sustainability plans came in in 2020. That's locals adopting their plans and starting implementation immediately, while the Department reviewed and opined on what those, what those conditions were.

For each of those plans, I'll say this, a majority of those plans were approved. They're moving forward. Only six. Six plans were found to be inadequate and they were due to very specific reasons for defining how sustainability was going to be measured and implemented in each of these basins.

They're working hard on resolving those deficiencies with the state board partners, and as has been stated a number of times, the intent is to get them back into local control as soon as possible. So we're working on those very collaboratively and I think we see a lot of good success.

So the map on the right really illustrates where many of those recharge projects are. And you can see the San Joaquin Valley is a very dense cluster of those points, really relying upon recharge to put as much water and balance these basins to the extent possible, versus the alternative, which is demand reduction.

That's limiting pumping, that's taking land out of production. And we definitely don't want to fail agriculture. Agriculture is essential to our state and something we need to support significantly. So what were the specific efforts that we did leading into and from our drought and into the flood season?

So Landflex is a program that is evolved during a drought period. We were trying to find ways to work with locals on the ground and in partnership with western United Dairies, the Almond alliance, as well as self help enterprises and California family farms.

So this effort was really intended to support local agencies who had a groundwater sustainability plan and had specific allocations, many of which were talking about the reduction of pumping to achieve sustainability.

This allowed for them to effectively be paid for meeting, expediting that goal and getting to those allocation standards, but helping them clear the lands, prepare the lands for fallowing, and making sure that they had the ability to navigate that in close proximity to disadvantaged communities whose drinking water supplies were currently being affected due to pumping.

So we're trying to find that offset. How do we support drinking water standards transition to a sustainable condition, and really helping the local landowners to transition to this new state. We got these projects started and it rained. It rained hard. We quickly pivoted. Okay, great, we just fell out of that land.

What if we can recharge on that land and now you get some of those credits you just sold I back by recharging on your property. So we really tried to open doors for collaboration from the landowner with the GSAs and the groundwater sustainability agencies that are out there are all in the process of developing allocation schemes, accounting frameworks and ability to trade.

And that's another issue that we've been working on from the water resiliency portfolio is really starting to talk about setting up frameworks and guidance on how to support the gsas in groundwater trading. So as they develop credits, how can you move these water around safely without impacting other parties? So there's some ongoing discussions there.

But as we transitioned into a very wet winter, a flood winter, we found opportunity to really explore working with local agencies who had shovel ready projects to capture and store and move some of these floodwaters off the system into areas where they could recharge higher in the basin, rather than allowing that water to find its way all the way to the Tulare lake bed.

That opportunity was fantastic. We were able to get out several temporary pumps to agencies. We were preparing lands with them. We called it the rip and chip program. That's the removal of old orchards as they were transitioning lands into dedicated recharge basins.

I think it was a very successful program, and they were able to report back to the state board the amount of water diverted at the end of the year. And we saw some profound capture and opportunities there. So from that, I'll circle back to just kind of the higher level observations.

And that's one that we need to really be thinking about, how we coordinate our groundwater management, our water resource management, with our flood control agencies.

There's a connection there that is still being developed, and we're working closely with the Central Valley Flood Protection Board and as well as within the Department, with our division of flood management to find ways to connect these dots, to identify when is the river in a stage that is one threatening to life and property, and a means for us to divert waters off of the system and put them into proper locations to store and recharge the groundwater basins.

Those opportunities, I think, are going to be normal in the future. But we need to navigate this transition to this action. And it's something that we haven't done in the past to the extent that we're describing here or is being described in the groundwater sustainability plans. We need to think about water quality.

We need to think about the impacts to the flooding conditions that are already occurring when we're talking about diverting off these waters. So it's a very delicate balance. It's going to take some time to work through those details.

And so, as I alluded to earlier, you know, we're working really hard with our sister agencies to identify opportunities to streamline these pathways? Where do we have those hurdles and what methods do we have available to us to support local agencies in getting over them quickly and efficiently and still meeting the mandates of all of our actions?

And we've been doing that through looking at supporting water right development process. The department's been supporting local agencies and navigating these waters while still working with the state board in collaboration and close communication. So we're being very efficient at the materials that we're having to compile to substantiate those permit processes.

And then the technical part where, where can we get the biggest bang for our buck and recharge? Where's the fast paths? Where can we start thinking more regionally from these flood waters and managing the system to really expand and store more water in the subsurface? I'm going to stop here and defer to my colleague Ajay to really discuss how these waters get into the ground and utilized.

Thank you very much Tim. Thank you Assemblymember Schiavo, Chair Papan, Chair oria and Assemblymember Mathis for having us here today. I manage the front part program at the Department and I'm going to give you a brief overview of the things we are involved in.

So, as you all know, flood map involves using high flows from rainfall or snowmelt for manage activity for recharge on ag lands or working landscapes. And it could include any of the features on the right. Reservoir re operation could include flooding bypasses include sending water to recharge basins or airlines and such.

Primarily, we are involved in three areas. We are conducting watershed scale studies, providing technical guidance to local agencies, and supporting pilot projects and studies. In partnership with Midset Irrigation District, we conducted a watershed scale reconnaissance study.

This was more of a proof of the concept study wherein looked at headwaters to groundwater all the way and modeled it using nine different models, starting with upper watershed reservoir model, then groundwater recharge, how agriculture performs and then developed a model called grad with help from sustainable conservation which involves modeling each parcel of land with conveyance, their size, crop type, seasonality and then permeability and such.

And then what we did is did a very extensive climate vulnerability analysis, modeling hundred years of hydrology, varying temperature from zero to four degrees, changing precipitation from current to 30% increase or 30% radio production and applied global climate models on it.

And then we learned that all sectors, water supply, ecosystem and flood, are very vulnerable to climate change. Just to give you an idea, the flood flows in Merced's river could peak about 6000 cfs and at 7300 cfs, it's going to start flooding. We found that in 15 years, by 2040 that's not too far.

The flood year flood flows could, this is a very high probability. The flood flows could peak at 16,000 cfs. As I said, 7000 is going to start flooding and we are seeing flows 16,000 and if it goes 2070, it's like many times higher. So then we started applying and the same thing we are seeing for groundwater condition.

Groundwater currently is dropping 50,000 acre feet per year. By 2040, if we continue with the same rate of demand is going to be about 80,000 acre feet per year drop.

So with climate, with floodmark strategies like operating, reoperating the reservoir based on weather information for fearow is called fearow and mar mixing, manage active region with it, we could reverse some of those, some of the vulnerabilities. We could bring down the peak from 18-16,000 down to 8000.

Same thing, the groundwater overdraft, we could reduce it to current levels by aggressively operating the reservoir. So such things are possible and it's good to be prepared in advance. And we have already started work towards it.

So seeing the results, the information that came out from it Legislature funded us to do to look at all the watersheds in the San Joaquin Basin. So currently we are working on five watershed studies and this is with even more advanced weather information.

We have teamed up with Cornell University and we are using weather generator to create the weather forecast for anticipated during changing climate conditions. And so we are doing headwaters to groundwater analysis of calibers, stannous loss, redoing some of the Mercedes, Tuolumne, Chowchilla, Fresno River, Annapurna River, and we are working with more than two dozen agencies.

These are the agencies we are working with and we have put together tool sets covering headwaters to groundwater, made a whole single model for the whole basin and then made the grad groundwater recharge a tool for all the recharge areas in each of the basins.

And these models will be turned over to the agencies, partnering agencies when we are done. So they can use this and do watershed scale planning whenever they are doing projects. So these studies will be completed next year, next June, and a lot of information will be coming out.

So by the way, the reports for the Merced study are posted on DWR website and I have one pager out here at the entry at the desk. So feel free to take it.

Then another area, as I mentioned earlier, we are supporting local agencies with planning and technical assistance and furthermore projects and we assisted several agencies with technical analysis required for the temporary revador rights applications.

And then we are trying to explore new ideas like how to obtain benefits, multi benefits from inundating floodplains, ecosystem benefit, recharge benefit at the same time. And then we are also providing guidance and outreach. We have a white paper on our website, goes in great depth about what is floodmark, how to do it.

And then we assembled a research Advisory Committee about 32 years ago which brought in more than 300 subject matter experts. And actually Jose and Tim and I think Eric are Chairs of three of the theme areas of the Committee and they have put together a plan, a floodmark research and data development plan which is again on our website, identifies data gaps which will filling those gaps after filling basically to allow us to expand flood mar at a greater scale.

And then we have formed a network working with several of our partner organizations. And under the network we host a monthly webinar on different topics and then have held various public forums, listening sessions. And the network has a website, floodmark.org dot. So with this, I stop here and hand it over to Eric.

Thank you so much for the update, the overview and pointing to the opportunities that exist. Next, we're going to invite our next two panelists with the California State Water Board to speak.

We have Erik Ekdahl, Deputy Director of Division of Water Rights, California State Water Board, and then Tina Cannon Leahy, Supervising Attorney, Office of Chief Counsel for the California State Water Board.

Good morning Chair and Members of the Committee, thank you for hosting us today. I'm Erik Ekdahl, Deputy Director for the Division of Water Rights. I'm joined by my colleague Tina Cannon Leahy, and I'll try and talk directly into the mic.

I'm going to talk a little bit more in detail about water rights and how water rights factors into recharge and how sometimes it doesn't. And water rights in California, as I'm sure you're all aware, are pretty complicated and it's true for groundwater recharge as well. So let's step through.

I thought I'd start by just defining some different types of recharge because I think it is important in how we look at the rest of the presentation and how we think about what needs a permit, what doesn't and what can be done to expedite some of those different approaches.

The first type of recharge we just kind of call natural recharge. Right. It's rain that falls on the surface of the land or rivers that kind of break over their levees and go into a floodplain, a puddle on a farm is actually contributing to natural recharge.

And there's millions of acre feet in an average or even wet year of natural recharge that occurs, measured in groundwater levels and how those rise or fall. You don't need a water, right. For natural recharge. Right. That's not managed, it's not controlled. There's also something that we kind of refer to as incidental recharge.

And this gets to some of the flood related recharge that we saw in 2023 and some of the subsequent trailer Bill legislation that was in SB 122. It's really a byproduct of another activity. So again, when you have flood and it goes onto a floodplain, you're usually getting some amount of recharge that goes with it.

You can also have water loss from the bottom of a canal. The key here is that it's incidental. It's not managed, it's not controlled. It's something that occurs as a byproduct of another action. And in this circumstances, in most circumstances here, it does not require a water. Right. Then we get to something called managed recharge.

And you heard the term Mar managed aquifer recharge earlier. This is something that's done specifically within action, right. It's done with intentionality, and you're driving water to a recharge basin to drive it underground. You could be doing active on farm recharge as a type of managed aquifer recharge.

Recycled water applied to land can be a managed aquifer charge type approach. Injection wells, there's a lot of different approaches to it. In General, that managed process requires a water. Right at some point in the process, and there's some variance to it, right.

You usually want to go through the specifics and the details, but if you're taking surface water intentionally with the purpose of storing it underground, at some point, it requires a water. Right. So to go into that a little bit further, groundwater recharge is the primary mechanism. You've heard earlier today cited by groundwater sustainability agencies to address overdraft.

How they do that is, in part, kind of this incidental recharge. It could come from natural recharge, it could come from shifting to surface water instead of using groundwater. But we kind of break it up into two different terms, something called underground storage versus groundwater recharge.

And those have legal ramifications in terms of water rights, in terms of how they're permitted or how they're not diverting water from a surface stream for underground storage requires a water right, and the State Water Board is the water rights permitting agency for the state. So why do we need permits for recharge?

And I'm going to kind of mix up the terms recharge and underground storage a little bit throughout, and I'm going to try and separate them out, but they're really the same physical process at its I core. Right. You're still taking water at the surface and putting it underground somehow. Why do we want permits for that?

First, it ensures that water is actually available for taking it and storing it. There's a lot of other water right holders in the State of California. We have about 40,000 water rights statewide, and California is a first-in-time, first in right state. In part. We also have a hybrid system where we have riparian rights.

There are no storage rights associated with the riparian right. You can't store water with the riparian right. So when you have hundreds, sometimes 150 years of prior appropriation in a watershed, just because you see water flowing in a stream doesn't mean that somebody downstream hasn't already called on that water.

And that's true even during relatively high flows, and it can be true even during floods. The Bay Delta watershed is a huge watershed, and because it's flooding in one sector doesn't mean that it's flooding in another.

And how that works out between the thousands and thousands of water rights within that one watershed can be exceedingly complex to work out. So we're protecting senior right holders. We're also protecting the environment. There are environmental benefits to higher flows. It's good for Flushing out water in certain areas. It's good for stream channel formation.

It's good for certain types of species. We also want to protect groundwater quality. When you're taking water and applying it onto the surface, you don't want to apply it someplace where maybe there's just been recent manure, fertilizer application, or maybe a recent pesticide application. And so there's some amount of protecting groundwater quality.

Not some, a fair amount of groundwater protecting. Protecting groundwater quality. That's part of what we do as our process. And all that has to be kind of figured out in advance. So how do we do that? Well, there's a couple different types of water rights permitting that can be applied for underground storage.

We have what we just call a standard permit. These are your everyday, permanent, forever water rights, and you have to go through a pretty laborious and long process. Standard water right permit can take years to decades, depending on the legal processes that go with it, the amount of protests, public protests that come in.

We also have another pathway for temporary permits, and I'll talk more about these in a moment. There's a couple different types of temporary permits. We have 180 day, about six month permit. We also, as of 2020, have a five year temporary permit, and that was due to recent legislation that added this pathway into the water code.

Within these two different types of approaches, we have what we've created internally through an administrative process. We call it the streamlined pathway. We're actively trying to figure out how we can process these temporary or standard permits more quickly. And by looking at flows and kind of doing some analyses, identified what we call the 9020 rule.

It doesn't really make sense at first, but the 90-20 rule at its core says if you're in the 90th percentile flow, so the top 10%, highest flows, right. You're already pretty high up there in terms of flow volume. You can divert no more than 20% of that streamflow.

And we can kind of assume that there is a limited or reduced effect to the environment and to downstream water right holders. We still do a little bit of analysis, but it's essentially a streamlined water availability analysis. There's also another component that talks specifically about floods.

So if it's an active flood where there's risk to human health or safety or infrastructure, that also can trigger the streamlined pathway. Why does that matter? Well, it turns out that there's actually a legal difference between water that's stored underground versus water that's just recharged, incidentally or naturally and legally.

Water stored underground under a water, right, remains surface water. You're just taking it and storing it underground. And so that can have pretty profound impacts in terms of how you're managing a basin and who can access that stored water. It legally protects the entity that has taken the effort to store that water underground.

It can't be used by others without their permission. It can be sold or contracted or transferred. It doesn't go to just the entire basin as a whole, recharged water. So water that's done incidentally or naturally legally becomes groundwater. There's no claim of ownership over it, and anyone can use it.

And so that's a pretty significant benefit in obtaining a water, right, if you think of the costs that go into developing one of these permits. But the cost of buying water on an open market during a drought, if you're able to store 10,000 acre feet under a recharge permit, right, you've gotten the water right. You've stored it.

That water goes for two or $3,000 an acre foot during peak drought years. That's tens of millions of dollars of potential benefit in obtaining that water right and storing that water underground.

So what have we been doing over the last couple of years? The last decade, we've processed a total of 48 temporary permits. The key in moving these forward, we've relied on CEQA suspensions. So during the 2014 to 2015 drought, there was a CEQA suspension in place.

During the 21 through 23 drought and some of the floods, there was a CEQA suspension in place. And so we are able to move forward on these much more quickly. Without the CEqA suspension in place, a CEQA document would be required.

Major milestones include the streamlined pathway, which was introduced in 2019, and the five year temporary permit, which was introduced in 2020. Just focusing on the last couple of years, we've processed about 24 permits, temporary permits. In 21-22 we only processed three, authorizing potentially up to about 80,000 acre feet of water.

But in 22-23 that really what year? We processed 10 temporary permits, authorizing up to almost 670,000 acre feet of water. And then last year was about 133,000 acre feet of water. But when we look at how much water was actually recharged under these permits, it's a lot less. I want to kind of talk through that a little bit, because I think it gets to some of the underlying questions we've heard earlier. So we authorized about 670,000 acre feet of water under 10 permits.

Staff have gone through and analyzed what the hydrograph, what the stream flows actually looked like in some of these watersheds and found that there's about actually 80,000 acre feet of water actually available for diverting. However, only about 20,000 acre feet was actually diverted. So that's a pretty huge difference. We authorized 670,000 acre feet.

Only 20,000 acre feet was diverted. Why is that? Well, a lot of reasons. One, there, sometimes we're late applications. So we try and emphasize, get your permit in before it starts to rain. Well, when we get a permit in in February and it's all been raining for three months, it takes us a couple weeks to process it.

You're just out of time, and I'll show a table in a minute that kind of steps through. We did get a lot of late permits over the last couple of years. Permits come in partway through the requested season, but the quantity authorized reflects the entire diversion season.

So even though we might not get the permit until January or February, they kind of do their calculations for how much, hypothetically, they could divert starting December 1. Well, we've already missed that time, and that's not really on the table in the first place.

Lack of infrastructure has been a big one temporary pumps recharge, where they're actually going to apply that water. Are there fish screens available in some of our sister agencies? Requirements there? Lack of readiness. Sometimes people, frankly, got excited. It's starting to rain. There's flood water. We want to get in. We want to get this permit.

But they actually didn't have everything else lined up, and it just led to other delays. And then there have been issues with reported difficulty complying with permit terms of fish screens and divergent criteria. I want to kind of talk through the diversion criteria a little bit, and I'll show a hypothetical example, and I'll see if I can step through it. So let's say that we have a permit coming to us, and we have, we're trying to estimate how much water is actually available. We have flow.

We can look at historical gauge data and figure out how much water has been there in previous floods or high flow events. And we look over the course of a diversion season in a flow flood scenario that's typically December through March or April. So looking at that hydrograph, we've come up with a hypothetical high flow event.

This is, you know, how much water we think could have been available throughout this entire time period. And that's really what you're calculating your potential permit volume on. But you also have to look at existing demand. There's other water users out there, especially with our 150 plus year old waterite system.

And so it's not necessarily this entire area that's available for recharge. It's actually just this area in here. But then what does the rain actually do? What kind of precipitation do we actually get? We can't guarantee that it's going to rain at this level the entire time. And this is what the hydrograph ends up looking like. You get higher flows that sometimes it dips down, it comes back up. And so that's the amount of water that's actually available for recharge.

We can't change this curve, but we can look at this hypothetical high flow event, and we can look at existing demand, and that's how we kind of factor in how much water is actually available for recharge. Trying to figure out this existing demand is exceedingly difficult.

And in some previous hearings back in January 23, we talked about water rights modernization. At its core, water rights modernization is understanding the existing demand. It's getting better accounting data, it's getting more timely reporting data so that we can actually dial this in a little bit. It's probably not a straight line.

It's probably a stepwise line that we can look at a little bit more clearly and understand who's using what, when they're using it, and how that could potentially be translated into additional water availability for other diverters. The other thing that we want to talk about is when does the permit come in?

So if you come in early in the season, you have a lot more opportunity for recharge. If you come in here, you don't have any opportunity for recharge, and that's been a huge issue for us. So looking at the water, year 23, streamlined permitting, I'll try and run through this relatively quickly. I know I'm running a little bit long. When we got a permit, was it submitted a couple months before the diversion season? We usually require about three to four months to process a permit. That's really fast for water rights permitting.

Come in early, come in in the summer, and we can work on it, get it in place before it starts to rain or before the diversion season starts December 1. In this case, this permit came in 97 days after their proposed diversion season began. We processed it in 13 days. This permit from Merced came in 23 days after the beginning of the divergence season. We processed it in 14 days. A couple of others took us a little bit longer, but here again, days to issue permit. These are generally in the order of a couple weeks to process.

It's highly, highly dependent on when the permit comes to us. And so whatever we can do, that's one of the key takeaways is earlier engagement, earlier planning and processing, and working with both our Department colleagues and the division can help expedite these permits so that they are in place before the wet season begins.

So we've done a bunch of outreach related to temporary permits. We've had staff workshops. We had one recently in June 2024, and Amanda Montgomery and Mike Conway from the division are here today in the audience. If there's additional questions, please come see us after the hearing. We've sent direct emails.

We've had eight staff events since 2023 related to various recharge, oftentimes with the Department or Fish and Wildlife. I want to pause a little bit because I'm going to switch gears. So we've talked about permitting. Now we're going to switch to flood diversions without a water. Right.

And in 2023, and then subsequently there is a new pathway for doing enhanced incidental recharge, really looking at flood and as a flood management approach, diverting some of that into areas where you can get incidental recharge as well. There were two Executive orders March 10 and May 17 that specifically carved out or highlighted existing law. Really?

That said, you don't need a waterite when you're diverting water for a flood control action. A lot of those Executive order components were added into the water code in Section 1242.1 through SB 122 in July of 2023. Whether it was the Executive order or SB 122, all diversions are reported to the board, and we post that material on our website.

So under the Executive orders in this really wet water year, we had about 75 diverters that took this flood management approach, about 250 separate points of diversion off of various watersheds for about 402,000 acre feet of water. Most of that was actually through this.over here related to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shunting water off of the LA Aqueduct. Subsequent to the Executive orders, water code 1242.1 was added. It spells out where it's appropriate to do this type of flood management.

Identified areas inappropriate for flood recharge, including recent Dairyland application areas, uncultivated land, recent pesticide fertilizer, or where it could damage other infrastructure. There were requirements about using existing infrastructure or temporary pumps, and a requirement you couldn't build something new solely for flood diversions without going through a full permitting process. Under this new water code, Section 1242.1.

In 2024, there were zero reported diversions under that flood trigger. Why is that? It's not because the language of 1242.1 was too restrictive. It was because it was a drier water year. It was an average or below average year. There weren't any floods.

And so you couldn't utilize the flood trigger the same way that you could in 2023. We're going to host a virtual workshop on October 9 related to this type of flood control diversion. It will include useful tips for implementation and compliance, how to file your report. It's going to also be recorded and posted. And just a note.

If you're interested in temporary permits, also come talk to us. We have recorded our June workshop, and that's also available on our website. I think that's it. I have some other extra slides, but we don't need to go into those details. .

Next. Thank you so much, Erik and then Tina, for joining us here today. Next, we'll move on to Stephanie Dietz, Board Member of Merced Irrigation District.

Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman Soria and Chairwoman Papin for allowing me to be here. My name is Stephanie Dietz, and I'm a board Member for the Merced Irrigation District. I don't have a presentation for you. I have more of a testimony so MID represents approximately 140,000 irritable acres and wildlife refuges in eastern Merced County.

MID owns and operates Lake McClure, which provides surface water to approximately 2200 farms. Crops grown with irrigation supplied by MID generate just under 1.5 billion in annual output for Merced County, both in production and processing. This represents more than 8000 jobs and the generation of 442 million in labor income. This does not include any ancillary business activity, but if you were to include that, such as trucking or transportation, we could add an additional $543 million in annual revenue.

Impact to our local economy although MID derives most of its water from the reservoir system, it is a conjunctive use district, relying on surface water stored within the aquifer to meet operational needs when surface water supplies are inadequate. I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to address your committees today.

MID actively participates in the Merced Irrigation Urban Groundwater Sustainability Agency, one of three GSAs managing the critically overdraft Merced groundwater subbasin. As a Board Member of this critical partnership, I'm here to provide you my perspective of kind of the summary of what you've heard and the local impact.

The Merced sub basin, spanning approximately 512,000 acres, was among the first regions in the state to have a groundwater sustainability plan approved by the California Department of Water Resources, demonstrating our local commitment to responsible groundwater management. Californians are all too familiar with the volatility that wet and dry weather years can bring to our everyday lives.

Now more than ever, your role in policy consideration is crucial. It's essential that we allow for the diversion of floodwaters when available to beneficial groundwater recharge that ensures the health of the sub basin and provides clean and safe drinking water for Merced's disadvantaged communities.

MID is deeply grateful for the unwavering support of the state's flood-MAR program that has invested 50 million in projects here in eastern Merced County. Your continued support and advocacy for this program are vital to our future success.

Allow me to draw your attention to two pivotal examples of flood-MAR applications that I believe are significant importance in demonstrating the impacts of when science and policy might not yet be aligned and how that impacts our community. In December 2019, the GSP Members collectively applied through MID to obtain a permanent water right to floodwater.

This would benefit the entire basin by allowing streams at flood stages to divert flows across multiple waterways to groundwater recharge sites or winter crops. Due to complex water right procedures that you just learned about this application is still pending with the State Water Resources Control Board. Secondly, in August of 2022, the GSP Member sought a temporary application for Mariposa Creek, the prominent waterway near Planada, through the fast track process that you learned about.

Approval for this application came in late January 2023, after Mariposa Creek flooded with conditions requiring a biologist to be on site one week before a rain event resulting in stream flows exceeding those 90% historic flows that we talked about. Let's take a moment to reflect on January 2023. At the time I was serving this community as Merced city manager, your local emergency teams here at the city and at the county were collectively working tirelessly through that event. Not just the first storm, but the second one.

And I can tell you from personal experience that we rescued thousands of lives stranded because of the floodwater and those floodwaters were 4ft high, they were Ayes cold and we had to provide shelter services to those families impacting by the overtopping on both Mariposa and Bear Creek.

Though some of those families are still struggling to recover and have not recovered since, many of them have faced permanent housing displacement and loss of all of their belongings. I stood beside many of you in response to an unimaginable crisis, looking for answers and asking myself, how could this be our reality?

I mentioned earlier the 2019 permit still not processed and the 2020 permit was received weeks too late with conditions that I don't know how we would have met at the time. We didn't believe it was going to happen.

I offer these two applications as examples of how local community leaders had the foresight to seek permission, albeit without success in wet cycles, to capture flood waters that could recharge the aquifer, improve the quality and quantity of local groundwater levels, and attempt to mitigate the impacts of floodwaters on critical infrastructure, homes, businesses and the lives of so many Merced county residents.

It's often said that the best solutions come from those who have survived the unthinkable. Under your leadership, Chairman Soria, legislation was drafted to alleviate these obstacles during severe weathers weather events. This solution was proven feasible under the governor's Executive order in 2023 and later codified as we heard about in SB 122.

In 2024, two bills again attempted to better support floodmar diversions. By building on SB 122. One Bill was amended to require excess conditions in the Delta 100 miles downstream from potentially impacted communities. How would this Bill have impacted Planada or Merced? Well, in January of 2023, the delta was not in an excess condition.

So under this proposed Bill, the diversion would not have been approved and flooding would have happened. The second Bill would require consultation with Fish and Wildlife and implementation of their prescribed conditions. These bills essentially set our community back to the challenges we faced with our previous applications. What other lessons can we learn about the impact of flood conditions in our community from the past?

Over the past 50 years, the disadvantaged communities of Planada, Merced and Franklin Beechwood experienced flood conditions, with the Delta not experiencing an excess six out of 10 times, and those were not necessarily in wet years, as you saw by some of the graphs before.

Now, I do not envy the impossible task you face as state leaders, but I commit to you that you do not face those challenges alone. We must work together to find solutions that balance California's water policy and seek creative solutions in floodmar projects that support our community's ability to grow and prosper.

The eastern Merced county communities of Planada, Legrand, Merced, Outwater, Livingston, El Nido, Cressy, and Bellico are all 100% dependent on groundwater for drinking water. Successful flood mar projects can ensure that water supply reliability exists to support these communities. A healthy and thriving Merced county benefits California tremendously at a time when the cost of groceries is at an all time high, Merced county produces an affordable, sustainable food supply for California, and we feed the world.

As you heard earlier, at a time when the American dream of homeownership seems out of reach for so many, Merced county offers affordable housing and business growth solution not found in other communities. As you move forward, let local experience drive identifying streams of interest in standard flood stage levels.

Let's prevent the devastation that floodwaters bring with a diversion to recharge sites that benefit communities instead of crippling them for generation. And let's do it without tying these projects to other communities or overburdensome conditions.

I applaud Governor Newsom and the Department of Water Resources for advocating for increased flood mar activities within communities that bear the brunt of flood conditions without the benefit of recharge. I stand ready to work with all of you on collaborative solutions that support a vibrant Merced county in California for years to come. Thank you again for this opportunity.

Thank you, Stephanie, for your testimony.

I think we're at the end of the panel, the first panel, which obviously we heard the overview, future plans, and then very important in terms of kind of the local perspective, in terms of how policy ends up being applied in communities and the impacts and sometimes even unintended consequences of the way that we shape policy.

So thank you for that. What we're going to do is open it up to questions to my colleagues, and then we will move on to the second panel after questions. Do you want to start?

First of all, thank you each for. I think this microphone has a delay to it. Thank you each of you, for your expertise and your time here today. And obviously our last speaker from MID. Kind of brings it all home as to how all these things either work collectively or they don't have. And so I appreciate the boots on the ground eye view, if you will. So I guess some of my questions relate to. I mean, I certainly knew we were going to get to the governor's Executive order. I don't know if you saw me talking about it here.

We're getting all the way to it, and I recognize that it does provide flexibility, certainly. But I guess my question is, and this really comes to Department of, Water, how is it that you think we can sort of scale up, and I know that you, I appreciate the expertise in all the mapping and the modeling that's going on and the difficulty sometimes that ties in with Mother Nature and how do we truly predict what's coming at us.

But I would be curious to know, are there things that you can suggest outside of just the mapping, which is a huge endeavor, no question about it. But how is it that we can scale up a bit more? Is it more flexibility in permitting. I don't know. I'm throwing that out to you, Mister Godwin, and I'm looking at you, but feel free to pass the buck.

Oh, I will, but I'll give it a stab first. So again, I highlighted the collaborative approach that we've been taking. We've been working with state Water project, I'm sorry, state board as well as CDFW, and really talking through what it means to divert off flood waters.

And what we saw with the bills that came in was people asserting their existing water right, that Erik pointed out, these are long term water rights downstream. Delta conditions really drive how this is functioning. So the challenge is when the floodwaters are coming through Mercedes, that Delta is not necessarily in excess.

So those opportunities aren't available for them to divert off freely. Right. So you need to consider some of those, those conditions that are embedded in those actions. I think one of the things we've been talking about is how can we start to really work with our flood agencies to evaluate and maybe index flood conditions.

We see the floodwaters coming from the sierras, they're coming into the valley. We anticipate those through. NOAA has flood advisories right they're constantly monitoring discrete stations.

How can we expand that and really look at all of the creeks and all of the river ways to be able to predict more accurately what is the effect of the timing of these high flow conditions that are threatening people's property and livelihood and lives versus when it gets downstream.

And so if we can start to develop some ability to coordinate and have some predictability about where those flood conditions occur, such that waters can be diverted off and still know what is the floor of that diversion, so that that water does make its way through the system and does not affect the ability for those senior water rate holders to still divert and capture the waters when it comes to them.

So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. In that sense. There's a lot of coordination. And it's strange. We're talking about flood agencies here, we are talking about recharge and water scarcity, but that's the nature of California's hydrology at this point. And we just need to embrace that and find new pathways through.

This is going to take everybody coming to the table. This is going to take some extreme thought and agreements about how we can navigate these pathways without immediately throwing the flag. You're injuring me. How do we find that pathway so that those opportunities start to manifest into actual water on the ground? I think that's a significant part of it. I also refer to my colleagues.

I would love to hear from you as well. What you're looking for is perhaps the appropriate triggers. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, yeah. And specific that they are, you know, truly triggers that are based upon the threat of impacts, the threat of, you know, flooding a community, and not just. Well, it's close. So let's capture this water and put it over here. Right?

So we need to have a framework about how we collectively work through this and navigate those pathways. So I think that's going to take time. It's going to take a lot of discussion. We've been working hard, looking at the bills coming through, looking to refine what is now 1242.1, SB 122, and it's hard.

I think 1390 made it so far and no further. Clearly, there's a lot of work to be done on that front, and it's going to take a lot of discussion and times of the essence. I mean, people are. We're seeing climate change effects occurring now. We're adapting the term, as sigma has always been.

We've been building the plane as we're flying it. It's a little scary. And so it's going to take some trust and some. Some coordination and some clear communications to build that trust, and I don't have a clear pathway forward.

The reason why I brought up the word trigger is because I kind of feel like if the triggers are in place, they will give you the flexibility, because the weather requires the flexibility, if you will. And so I'm a little more optimistic we can get to triggers a little faster, but that may be just me. I know Assemblymember Rubio, sorry, is chomping at the bit, but go ahead. Or did you want to. Yeah.

I'm going to add something to this. For the watershed studies, we looked at at scale implementation. How can we do that? There are three levels of implementation. One is we can skim water off the raging rivers that we have seen. Provides very little benefit. To get scale at scale, you got to reopen the reservoir.

You got to get the reservoir engaged with Marden, manage active recharge. And that requires working with Army Corps, with state agencies and local agencies. And then you can actually make big difference to the system. You can, you will reoperate in hollow Mud water in the reservoir and then send it down into the.

Into the groundwater storage and then change the curve of the operation. So that's what we would recommend, but that requires us working together. And I'm going to stop. Looks like there is a lot to be said here, and I'm going to ask Erik to kindly elaborate on what it's going to take to do umbrella level permit.

Because what we are looking at is whole watershed, you know, taking opportunity of wherever there is permeable ground, sending the water there to recharge. And we have made a tool called grad. MID has that so that they can intelligently send water to willing landowners who have high permeability.

So that, and depending on crop type, they know how much it's going to take, how much ponding it can take. And all of this can be done at the same time for all lands, but it requires permit, umbrellas, level permit. So maybe I'm going to request Erik to kindly elaborate on that.

What, would you just explain the umbrella.

Because you see, the temporary permit that we are talking about is small, small scale projects. But when we are talking about the whole water district, then it requires a permit of the umbrella, what they call umbrella level, umbrella scale permit.

So an umbrella scale permit is basically, you know, typically you think of a water right as one point of diversion and one place of use, and an umbrella says, we have this whole watershed MID has 140,000 acres, for example.

Let's have 15 or 20 points of diversion, all operating under kind of the same water diversion trigger, and we can divert it in a bunch of different places so we're not hyper focused on kind of one specific place. We already do allow this pathway, so that is a possibility under our existing permitting regime.

Then who gets the water once it's.

Been, if it's under a water right permit, it would be whoever holds that water right permit. And so if I'm a GSA, let's say a GSA could file and apply for a temporary permit as the GSA, they have that power under their joint powers authority. Usually then it would actually be property of the GSA.

How they worked out with individual landowners would be a local decision. The board would not get involved with that. We'd say, do you have a process worked out? And if they did, we'd say, great. So we try to stay out of that component of it because it is.

Many different sites, so involve many different people. Okay, thank you for clarifying that.

Okay, thanks.

Just wanted to follow up on, I think, the question that was made by chair, Chairwoman Papan in terms of. And I think that you, obviously, you've responded in terms of the opportunity that exists in getting people together. And, yes, it's gonna take time, but when can we start? How fast can we get it done?

Because obviously, communities like Planada, the McSwain area, the Tulare Lake communities down in the South Valley, can't wait. You know, what we had to do this year, or this past year was that we had to look for General Fund money, $20 million to help people, provide them some relief.

And I would hate for us to take so much time, and I get it that we want to get it right, but I think that we also need to have some flexibility because time is of the essence.

And so I'm interested in seeing it in us, you know, moving along a little bit quicker to figuring out a pathway, more flexibility, so that we don't see another planada and we don't have to be advocating for, you know, a $20 million General Fund allocation to help these families get back on their feet, which, as mentioned, many are still kind of in the process of.

And so just, you know, who needs to be at the table? How can we make that happen sooner rather than later?

Excellent point and question. Really. I think the best path for expediting this is coordination with the locals, and it's really about connecting our local flood when we speak about diversion of floodwaters. Okay, this is outside the water right scheme. So we have a clear pathway.

If you want to take credit for that water and you want a water right for it, there's a pathway. It's outlined and prescribed, and getting started early is the most important part to effectuate that pathway. Floodwaters come fast and furious. We can't wait for that storm to be on us when we start going.

We should be thinking about diverting. So right now is the time for the local flood agencies to be looking through their observed conditions and defining what thresholds, what are the flow conditions when we see emergency actions needing to take place to protect people and property, Emmer said.

I think the example was one of the highways floods regularly and we looked at, well, what stage, what was the flow in that system when that condition occurs, where you're limiting egress to and from an area because the highway is flooded and it happens all the time, that was a good threshold to start establishing.

That's one spot, one creek in a very large area. So what we need to start doing is really thinking comprehensively from the county levels, and the counties are thinking about these things now about where do they have emergency response, what do those flooding conditions look like?

And then we need to correlate that to what is that condition in the river or creek that is occurring, and how do we define that once we define those thresholds, those trigger points, I think we can say above which we can start moving water off the system, but there's still that question of, well, where's the bottom of that and how long do we divert and at what point is our diversion going to start injuring another downstream water?

Right holder, that's the longer term question that I think is going to take time to resolve and really build confidence in those thresholds and triggers that we're describing here. I think right now is the time. And we've been working with the Central Valley Flood Board President Jane Dolan there.

She's been very tuned in on this and how we can adapt the next flood plan to support local agencies in doing these things. So we're starting to mesh together worlds that haven't traditionally been meshed together, and it's awareness and bringing them to the table and saying there's opportunity here. We need these things.

You're the flood managers, you're the experts in your region about how this occurs. We need those thresholds developed so then the water managers, the water suppliers can start to evaluate. Well, do I have space to store these floodwaters? How can I assist in this flood response?

So we're melding worlds, and it's happening in real time as SGMA's flying down the roads and agencies are trying to implement their research projects.

I know Assemblywoman Schiavo wanted to follow.

Up just on this topic of permitting. So as I mentioned, the Santa Clara river is one of the last natural rivers in Southern California, in my district. And so our water agency, Sev water, has been really focused on recharge opportunities and different ways to recharge.

And they're also texting me and telling people I'm in this hearing, and they're like, how do we get permits faster? So it seems like a hot topic. But, you know, I wonder. I know, Mister Echel, you were putting up the slides earlier, showing kind of when permits were coming in, how quickly they were approved.

Are those temporary permits or. Okay, and so for a water agency, it sounds like that's not the case. Water agencies need a more permanent permit and not the temporary.

We would encourage water agencies to approach it through a temporary process if they're interested in starting because, frankly, why not? There is a cost associated to it. So that may be part of it, but it does take a long time to do a standard water rate, and that's because of requirements in the water code.

There's a lot of due process that's just part of water rights permitting. But the temporary processes are faster. There are less due process elements associated with it.

And so getting a 180 day pilot project or translating that into a five year temporary permit, you come in once you get it for five years, that's a great segue into a permanent water. Right?

So you can even apply for both at the same time, the five years up and running, you can divert under that five year temporary permit while we're also processing your standard permit at the same time.

And so there's pathways we're trying to expedite so you don't have to wait 510 years for a standard permitting process, and you can get going right away. So encourage them to reach out to us and start the conversation.

Thank you. And then just one other quick follow up question. Do you. So for the folks, for example, who were late getting their permits in, is there anything that the Water Board does kind of proactively?

Because it sounds like now is the time to start getting those requests in, to get the word out and say, hey, you know, get moving, turn it in.

Yeah, absolutely. And we pointed out we did a workshop in June of this year. We've been sending targeted emails to people that we know have applied in the past or consultants that have worked on recharge projects. We work very, very closely with the Department of Water Resources.

And I think one of the things I'd want to emphasize in 2023, a lot of the reasons we got so many more permits through is because they worked with the Department. The Department provided technical assistance upfront and that helped us streamline the permit once it got to us. So additional technical assistance. We do webinars. They're posted online.

We're going to have another webinar in October, and then just encouraging people to reach out to us.

And how much did the permits cost?

So right now they're a couple $1000. A standard water, right. Is very. Well, I won't say very expensive. It has a cost associated with it. It depends on the size of the water. Right. Once you get above about 32,000 acre feet, the application fee is $600,000. That covers us for a lot of years.

But we are a fee funded agency, so we have to generate fees. And if it takes five to 10 years to process a permit, we have to recover those costs. The water rights, temporary groundwater recharge fees, I think, are right now at about three to 4% of our standard fee. So we are immensely subsidizing the recharge permitting.

Tomorrow at the State Water Board public meeting, we will consider changes to our fee structures, which will raise that to about 25%, 35% of our standard fees. So it will be an increase. It's still very cheap relative to a standard permit, but again, we have to generate cost recovery, essentially to Fund our staff.

Okay, thanks. I have a couple questions, but I'll pass it to Assembly Member Mathis.

Thank you, madam chairs. There's a lot to dissect here, which is probably why we are still here. Let's go into. You discussed umbrella permitting and part of the map we were talking about flood and Mar were conversations about well injection were brought up. What I didn't see and what I haven't heard.

And I've been talking about doing injection wells for a decade, even to the point of the lower, and it wasn't mentioned, but even the gravity pita ones, which are way cheaper. Why isn't there a map of pinpoint spots where it would be better to use?

When are we going to have that as a state, especially for local agencies and funding for those projects, because we know those are expensive.

We know during these flood points, we can say, hey, if we open up this gate here and put water on this acre and we have this injection well there, we can sink water quickly and protect a city or a town that's downstream, because that is a huge factor that we do not have in the system.

The other aspect of that, and it was mentioned about credits. How do we ensure our farmers who choose to take the added floodwater on are going to get credits for doing so? Because that has not been worked out yet, and it's been a huge, huge issue.

Every farmer that I've talked to is like, hey, I want to take it, but what's going to happen? I'm not getting a credit for it. I'm not getting this for it. It might damage my crops. There's a lot of uncertainties.

And guaranteeing them a credit for taking on that floodwater would help assure them that there is some protection, that they're going to get something out of it because a lot of these folks can plan on it, that they would go move dirt that they already can move to be ready for it. They know a storm's coming.

They know they can go out. They know they can do a few things on their property to brace for that impact, and they would be more flexible. And I see a lot of heads nodding in the crowd. It would give them that ability to do so. And we don't have it where they're able to.

And that gets back into that flexibility of the permits and how quickly those permits come out. But it's, what I see is we don't just need a quick permit on a special program, but the GSA's, and this is the biggest problem with this whole system is everybody's still not working together.

10 years and we're still not working together because we have the flood groups, we have the GSA groups, we have irrigation groups, we have flood management. We got to come together and work together. And these permits need to give that flexibility within all of it.

And it needs to be the umbrella permit because we keep doing the little one off permits of. And the problem is, is the one off permit gives water to this side but not water to this side. And the problem is the water on this side.

This field can only handle so much during a flood, but the permit doesn't allow it to go over, even though we know we could. And I spent time on the ground, in the dirt, in the mud during the big flood. You showed the picture of my district.

I think it was my car down there in Tulare Lake because I was there. Yeah, a lot of us were there. Exactly. When we have the ability to open up and move water, but we can't. It's a problem because what turns into is the Cya. Everybody is afraid of getting sued if they don't do it.

Including yourselves, including the agencies, what does the legislative body. And I'm retiring, but I'll be back and I'll be a thorn on your side in other ways. What do my colleagues need to do next year legislatively to have that umbrella permitting done quickly because we know we have with the flood mar and we passed this shoot.

I was joint author on the Bill the other year, making sure we can use the radar to track when the storms were going to drop because we have that technology. So, so we know when the water is going to come. We start tracking that off all as far away as almost Hawaii. The radar is tracking it.

So we know within days and we know weeks out, this storm is coming. We know where it's going to hit. We know the weather pattern. And so what do they need to pass, not only for the state side, but also to get army corps to engage with our federal partners.

So I'll talk a little bit about the permitting, and those permitting pathways already exist. If you want credit for that recharge water, come get a water right, whether it's a temporary or a standard one. And then that water that you store underground is yours to do what you correct with that.

But that's ahead of time.

That's ahead of time.

The current system is that's ahead of time. And if they do it in the heat of the storm, it's too late. And the problem is a lot of these guys don't know where that's going to be.

You're asking a farmer that's still trying to make a decision whether they're going to plant in the spring or not to fill out a permit. There's a whole lot of unknowns.

So we're not necessarily right. So that's the folks that want to come in and do that advanced planning.

They have the means, resources, time, capacity to do so under the incidental flood recharge component, which I think is what you're highlighting when we get these really big storms and it starts to flood and you have to make a split second decision that's outside of the board's permitting authority.

And the credit in that scenario is entirely decisions of the local GSA, other groundwater users. The state does not play a role in how the GSAs want to credit incidental recharge. They can work that out and in some circumstances they have, but the state does not permit that.

And so if you obtain that water right, you go through the state board and you get that permit, you have that underground storage. If you're doing that incidental flood recharge, how they work out how that incidental recharged water is credited to the individual farmers is a local role and a local task.

Tim, if you have anything to add.

I want to add one more thing. Here. Point, you said about how do we know where there are good points for recharge? So DWR, as you know, flew the helicopter over the valley and has the AEM data available that goes down how many feet, 1500 thousand feet down.

And for the water studies, we have pulled that information into the water study for the whole basin. Now, for the groundwater model that we have made, has that information that what is the permeability or where are the good spots for recharging?

And then on top of it, with overlaid the Grad groundwater Assessment recharge assessment tool, which has conveyance connected in all land parcels with their permeability information and what crop has been there. So we have all that information. And Gratt intelligently will tell you where to send water to get the maximum amount of recharge.

And considering the ponding that different crops will take depending on the season, you know, at the time, not every crop can take ponding because it depends where they are in the growing season. So all of that is available. And these four, the grad tools, are ready.

And after June 2025, they will be turned over to the local agencies. So they will have all of this and they can put this to use in sending water to the best places for recharge.

In addition, also identified locations like disadvantaged communities in those same tools, so that we can send water to those areas as well, so that it will improve the groundwater conditions and improve their wells. All of that is available in our models. And one more thing I want to add.

The groundwater model that we have made is for the whole basin, a single model. So when one GSH recharges, water doesn't stay there, it's within, is actually leaks out to the neighboring basins. And after a year, it comes back in the river. So only one third of the water recharge, we have noticed stays in the basin.

Everything else moves away. So that's why it's knowing this. Actually, all of them, all the GS's will be required to partner. So they know who is doing what they cannot stay back saying, okay, I don't care. But the thing is, somebody else is recharging. It's not going to be available to them. Right.

So these are some of the things that we have going on, which goes.

Back to the big umbrella permit.

Yes. And just to pile on the accounting you mentioned there. And how do farmers know that their actions are going to get credit? And that's something that SGMA did, I think, really well. Calls upon the locals to decide. So the gsas are required to develop water budgets for their basin. We have a best management practice out there.

So people are talking apples to apples, ideally. And so we're developing an understanding of how much water is in the basin, how much water they're putting in the basin, how much water they're extracting from the basin. Right. So therefore they can make allocations and say, you get this much.

Now, if we have a flood condition, an incident, incidental recharge occurs that's benefiting the whole of the basin. The GSA is still able to manage those waters that occurred there. Maybe they get a little kick in their allocation because there's added water and they've achieved their sustainability goals.

I'm going to, for the sake of time, I'm going to stop you at that, because some of those gsas that have done that, that have made local rules have been put under suspension. So that's the state telling them that the rules they made aren't good enough. So that that's an issue.

And I'm going to stop you right there because we don't have time to go into that. But that's the fact there are gsas that have written, wrote rules that have been told by you guys, by your agencies that, hey, you're under suspension because the rules aren't what the state wants. And that's literally in court.

Now, the last thing that I want to answer is it's been mentioned because this just happened this morning, night, a couple hours ago. And this is from Secretary Karen Ross. 100 million has been given for actual projects to help recharge.

So why would Karen Ross this morning say that better management of groundwater is essential for ag to maintain food production in the face of climate change? We know this part. But she points out that the state has invested nearly $1.0 billion into addressing groundwater issues since the passengers sigma. So we're hearing only 100 million.

What happened to the other $900 million? Where is this money going? What are we doing? Yeah, and why is the SEC, you know, our ag secretary is like, what's going on? So I got you guys here. So what's going on?

Well, no, absolutely. It's a valid question. SGMO is a new program and it required the state to staff up the Department. But all a lot of money has gone out, not only for recharge projects, but also to plan development, also to facilitation and technical and planning assistance to help local agencies navigate this.

So that's where this broader number, nearly $1.0 billion, has been dedicated to. SGMA is in the full scope of creating SGMA and putting these things in place. The department's been pushing out a lot of both technical assistance as well as planning assistance to helping agencies develop those plans and implement their plans.

Now, I could get more specific granularity to how those funds are distributed. You know, that near 1 billion, and get that back to you.

Yeah. That would be, I think, useful information. For through the chairs. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for the questions, Assembly Member Mathis. Just very quickly, I want to transition over to panel number two, and we may have additional questions, but I did want to follow up on a couple things.

We had board Member Stephanie Dietz talk about two specific permits that MID. Applied for. One of them was approved, the temporary, the more recent during the planada flooding.

However, at least from my understanding, there were some conditions, not sure how realistic they were because obviously, I think the determination was that they were not able to take advantage of the permit. Can you speak to that? What are some learned lessons? What are we going to do to change that?

Because obviously, we are still dealing with the impacts of the flooding that happened in that area and the fact that we couldn't take advantage of the permit. And then second, on the 2019, I think, permit that still hasn't been approved.

Just want to get feedback on, I know that you guys are trying to expedite as much as you can, but 2019, we're in 2024.

Yeah.

May I just dovetail one quick part of that, too? If you're applying for a temporary permit, how much of that can be factored in into getting a permanent permit? Because it kind of seems like, or at least I hope we're not doing duplicative work with duplicative fees.

So a lot of the work under a temporary permit can feed directly into the standard permit. Again, part of this conceptual pathway of applying for a five year and segueing that into a standard permit, there are duplicative fees.

But again, that's part of our fee structure and goes to supporting the different work that goes under the two different types of permits because they are two different permits, but the technical studies, the flow information that we might get, the places of use, all that feeds directly into the other. So you don't have to do that twice.

The 2019 permit, I'll touch on that quickly. It's still under review at the board. And so we don't want to go into a lot of details here because we haven't had a chance to sit down with M ID and run through some of the questions and concerns that we've had with the permit itself.

I'll just say that it is more than simply a recharge permit. It's a very expensive permit, 400,000 acre feet on a river system that in 2022 ran completely dry. The Merced river had no flow in it at the confluence with the San Joaquin river. And so it is challenging to reconcile a request for 400,000 acre feet.

And it is not just in high flow years that the request came in for a river system that also occasionally goes completely dry. And so that's part of what we're trying to work through. What's appropriate, what's not, what is the timing that goes into this application, the temporary permit. And I definitely.

What about the timeline, though? Why does it take so long to make that determination? Like, why can't you guys say yay or nay by now?

The two factors, one is the water availability analysis. It's exceedingly complex, and we've run through a couple of different processes internally to look at that water availability analysis, including developing a new tool that implements part of the drought water availability that we ran through between 2020 and 2023.

We also did refocus the division's work during the drought of 21 through 23. And we deemphasized or deprioritized working on some of these different types of permits to accomplish other drought work in the watershed.

So it's a factor of staffing, it's a factor of timing, and it's a factor of a very complicated permit that we're trying to work through the appropriate due process.

And what's the expected remaining timeline then?

It depends. It could be a couple of months. It could be longer than that.

Hopefully not five more years.

Hopefully not five more years.

Okay, well, my eyes are on you guys. Just letting you know. 2022, though, the conditions.

So in 2022, just to clarify, we didn't get the permit in August. I think collaboration started with the Department in August of that year. We got the permit in late December, and we processed it, as we noted, in 13 days. We had staff working overtime over weekends, over the holidays, in late December to get it done.

And I think the narrative about how long that permit took really doesn't do justice. The collaborative spirit that we did it with, we really did, I think, work very well with both mid and DWR to try and speed it through as quickly as possible, but there are challenging elements to it.

And so when we process a permit, we have to go through a public objection process that's part of the water code. And so we basically have to publicly notice the permit, and then we have to wait for people to come in and say, here's an issue with it.

Here's something that we essentially want to protest the permit on. The part of that can be environmental impacts and part of it can be other water quality concerns. And in the 2022 application, one of the big questions was fish screens on some of the potential temporary diversions. The other was potential effects on groundwater quality.

And if we go and look at all of the board's permits since 2015, we've had a term in it that says, basically you can't apply it where people have been applying dairy manure application, right? You have dairies or you have some other kind of manure management.

One of the management practices for that is to apply it to agricultural fields that works as a natural fertilizer. But you don't want to do that in the same place where you're going to flood that field a couple of weeks later because it leaches nitrate into the groundwater basin.

Groundwater in the central valley is heavily impacted by nitrate. Assemblymember methods, please.

There's the theory, right? This is the. On your end, it's theory, right? What happened during the flood? When Thule Lake came back, Mother Nature doesn't really care. Levees are going to break. Water is going to flood into those dairies because I saw it, and you have zero control over that.

So on the permitting side, how are we going to have a permit that says, you know what, man? If your levee breaks and it's going to flood your dairy, hey, you can divert that water because that's the reality. That's what happened. So our permit mostly allowed for that.

But what it said is that when you divert that water, don't apply it on the area that you're trying to prevent flooding. That's a dairy application area. And when we got the Merced permit area, about 90% of it was in fact a dairy application area.

And so, again, not because of the board saying, no, you're not allowed to divert, it was local planning that didn't accommodate this term. That's been in every temporary permit since 2015. This is the kind of collaboration and early engagement that I think is very avoidable.

This is the stuff that we can work through in advance, and it should be very easy to kind of not have that happen again in the future. But we have to talk early enough. We have to have a process.

So not having built into every year since 21st, our chairs have the ability to do Committee bills. So why was that not suggested to be added into the Committee bills this year or last year or the year before.

The decision on what bills to raise to the Committee is part of the administration's ongoing legislative effort.

But you just said there's been an issue with this. Every year our committees do Committee legislative bills to clean up, to fix these language holes. So why was that language not brought forward to the Committee?

Maybe I didn't explain adequately. It's not an issue. It is something that has been in every permit that we've issued. So this requirement, you can't apply floodwater on areas where it may lead to groundwater quality issues.

But we know in a high flood event that it's going to happen.

Not necessarily. Right. Depends where you're diverting, not necessarily where it leverage reaches and floods a dairy that's beyond our control where you're diverting.

I may or may not have a rock hit my windshield on the way home today, but I still have insurance to cover if it does.

And you've spent a couple of weeks presumably going through and planning to get that insurance upfront, and that's all we're saying. Let's plan and get that insurance up front.

My point is we could have had language in the Committee bills to fix this.

There's nothing to fix. It is a prerequisite. You can't apply to areas where you're going to. You can't apply.

But during a flood, when the levees break, it's going to be applied not.

Necessarily in the area where there are dairy application areas.

If a levee breaks that's going to hit a dairy, it's going to go there.

I think the point is that, I think the point is that we're trying to plan ahead so that we divert so that that does not happen. And I think that what we need to do is figure out how to expedite our plans so that we do have the mechanisms to be able to do that.

And I think that that's, you're hearing just kind of the frustration because you guys don't live in our communities. You guys don't see the every single day where we are having to face our constituents that are living under these conditions, especially during these extreme weather patterns that we will continue to have.

And so we want to avoid that. And so whatever we can do policy wise to ensure that we do that moving forward is what we want to do.

So I just want to, the last thing, because we need to move on to the second panel and give an opportunity for the local folks to also talk about some of the challenges that they have and opportunities. But just very quickly, on the 2022.

Just wanted to make a point, and I think you were trying to get there, but we didn't really get there in terms of the conditions. Again, they were not able to utilize a temporary permit because some of the, I guess I would call them unrealistic conditions for them to implement. What are we going to do?

How are we going to fix that so that we can actually take these permits and implement them in our communities?

I think the fish screen issue is being worked through. There's a lot of, I think, positive developments in working with Department of Fish and Wildlife understanding what we mean by screening temporary pumps. We're not looking for full fledged NIMS quality screens. We're looking for something pretty basic and understanding and messaging that, so that people understand it.

I think that's a huge issue that, again, is very solvable and we can work through, and we're actively trying to do so. The groundwater quality issue, I also think is very solvable. It's just very conscious planning in advance.

Okay, well, we got to do that planning with, I think, a little bit more of a sense of urgency from at least my perspective and what I've seen. And, you know, today we're talking about floods, tomorrow we're going to talk about droughts.

And so making sure that we get it right in a time of excess water is going to be important so that we can survive and these communities can survive during times of drought.

So, if I may, I'm hearing you. Loud and clear, and I think it's reasonable, certainly. You know, there's a part of me that says, well, a permanent permit costs you 600 grand, and what's going to take you forever to get. Perhaps the fee should be reduced by how long it takes you.

That wouldn't be a whole lot of fun, would it? Tomorrow you got a hearing on increasing. Perhaps that's something we could take into account, because I just feel like it becomes diminishing returns to a large degree. So you're hearing the pain. Obviously, it gets to a point of impracticability if it takes so long. Just final question.

I'm assuming some of you are using AI models, artificial intelligence not involved. Well, perhaps that might help in the expediting. I just throw that out. You are, Professor.

Okay, well, we use artificial intelligence combined with satellite imagery to detect flooding and also detect idle land. And just to get some, you know, some in advance information of what areas are seeing the most. The hotspots for idling during the house and floods.

It seems like a tremendous opportunity. Okay, thank you for sending yeah.

Thank you so much to all our panelists. We are going to call up our second panel, which includes agriculture communities Members and farmers, to discuss groundwater recharge projects on their farms.

I think that, again, you know, we were getting information at a very high level and I think at the end of the day, it's about how we implement. So hearing directly from the folks that have had opportunity to work on these projects. So first, I'd like to introduce our first panelist, Elijah.

And I'm going to butcher your last name, Gridanus Graydonis. Excuse me, dairy operator in the Fresno Tulare area. Then we also have Jennifer Peters Marcarian family out of Madera. And then also Vicki Garcia Moya with Echo family farms in the Chowchilla area.

And finally, we will have our speaker, Michael Clairborne, who is part of leadership council for justice and Accountability. So we can go ahead and get started with Elijah.

There we go. Hi, my name is Elijah. Thank you for letting me come here today. It's my first time talking at one of these, so if I need to adjust something, just let me know. Typically I voice up in the corner of an irrigation district. Yeah, my name is Elijah.

We are farmers in Tipton, California, part of the lower Tule River irrigation District, GSA, like someone mentioned earlier, I think there's an actual hearing right now going on about our GSP, which my dad's attending to. Voice a couple comments over there.

Highly in support of our own district staff, staying in charge and keeping some of the control local on that one. I've heard a lot about recharge. I kind of got my start and recharge last year. I learned about water basically in the flood season and really liked it and worked with some awesome people locally.

Was pointed to a lady named Anya and Aubrey who are part of the Almond alliance and then the Western United Dairy Association that presented this landflex program. And we participated in that.

We sold our overdraft to 25% of our land and we converted what was going to be a continued corn crop wheat rotation that we planned on planting into pistachios. We ended up fallowing that land and building a recharge basin.

That recharge basin put about 2500 acre feet of water into the ground last year and about 1300 acre feet of water into the ground this year. So that was really fun. We had canoes out there. It was a blast.

I kind of wanted to mention a little bit about this landflex program because it brought me in to the conversation into the picture. I was that local farmer who got dragged in by the emails and the people kind of poking fingers at us, hey, this is your program here, join.

And Landflex was a really awesome experience with that. So I come from a beef on dairy cattle operation. We also do pistachios, we do a little bit of crops. And now we're into water of all things. Some really interesting things I saw on the slide, the Doctor Knight survey equipment.

I've spent hours on a quad pulling that stuff around. Very fun, very useful tool. We identified areas of our property that were best fit for recharge. Actually, we identified it after we built the basins, but we got real lucky that we built in the right spot.

But now we're looking for additional locations on our property and other properties for sale of where to develop more of these recharge basins. One interesting thing to note from a landowner perspective is the irrigation district infrastructure is a lot more set up for surface water deliveries for the primarily use of irrigating crops, not so much recharge.

So in our local irrigation district, we find a clear boundary of on farm recharge is that our canals can't really handle that much water going through it. We can irrigate our crops with them, but to try to recharge and irrigate at the same time is pretty, we reach our canal capacity pretty quickly.

And I get to have those fun conversations with the district staff asking about that. So with kind of my background, kind of stated landflex was the program we got into. I'm going to speak a little bit on behalf of that program because it was such a great thing for us.

We kind of realized about this SGMA situation with the concept of a water budget. And by enrolling in Landflex, we were able to permanently give up certain APN's rights to overdraft, basically, which was a really cool deal for us because it was monetized, which was awesome.

So it started making a bit more sense that way, and then it was also a bit necessary. So that was kind of allowed us to bring in the GSA's regulations of, okay, you can only overdraft this much.

Well, with the landflex funding opportunity, we were able to say, okay, well, we don't really need to be overdrafting that much. We can forego this much overdraft and continue our farming operations a normal manner. So that was kind of some of the landflex learned situation. From right off the bat.

Landflex kind of came up with a drought type response. I never really experienced it there. I learned it in the flood type response. So it was really cool. We had a fallowed field enrolled in Landflex and we were able to begin flooding this fallowed field with just our regular irrigation system, just with our recirc pump going.

It was about 150 acres of just continual flooding while building a recharge basin on the field, which was a really awesome thing to do.

One impact of that recharge basin we ended up building last year, our neighbor next door, we actually flooded their septic tank because of how much water we were able to put in our very small area. It was really awesome experience. Everyone was like, whoa, this is crazy. We're putting a whole bunch of water in the ground.

Yeah, the septic tanks flooded. That's easy, you pump it out. But that was a really cool local impact. Participating in programs that allow and encourage and monetarily encourage the on farm recharge put our local farming operations into that balanced water budget long before our GSA's plan of 2040.

So our local farm no longer needs to use any overdraft, really, because we get the credits for the recharged water we put in the ground.

And as long as we stay within our measurable objectives on subsidence and water elevations in our upper and lower aquifer, we're allowed to use that water in our particular apns and keep farming with it, or we're allowed to transfer it to our neighbors and help them keep farming with it.

So it's a really cool system that landflex incentivizes us as growers to participate in that. Now, going forward, there's 7000 acre feet in an account that would not have been there without it.

A little statement here. We're really looking for some more opportunities such as landflex. I'm not sure what monies are all available, but from a farmer's perspective it is incredibly costly to recharge.

Last year we racked up a half $1.0 million water Bill that was predominantly recharged water, which is kind of a lot, especially when I'm trying to convince my dad hey, let's keep the pumps on and let's keep the turnouts open. He's saying, well Elijah, where am I supposed to find the funding for your little project here?

Let's see. So continued funding of programs like Landflex, if they have a bit more emphasis on recharge would be really awesome. A bit more emphasis on building recharge. Following lands is great, but when you have the water opportunities, creating programs that emphasize hey, go out and build the recharge.

And maybe some sort of emphasis on hey, you banked 1000 acre feet. Okay, cool. Here's a little monetization to help cover that, you know, $100,000 water Bill you just got from your irrigation district and I'll kind of conclude there. Very happy with some of the programs that have come.

But very much looking forward to the continuation and maybe new programs too. We're open to everything we can get. So thank you guys very much.

Thank you Elijah for your testimony. We'll move on to Miss Jennifer Peters from the McCarrion family.

Thank you very much for having me and giving me a chance to voice some concerns and then also share the joys of what we did as a family. So he'll get this, what I put together, it's basically just an overview of what the project entailed.

And then some pictures so you can see what it looks like to have a recharge basin that's full of which it's not right now. So I'm with Markerian family limited partnership. We are right now three generations farming together. My dad Robert and my son Kevin and myself.

And the benefit of that is we have old school farming and then new school farming. And then I'm in the middle trying to manage both of them. And it's created this really neat opportunity to farm in a better way and be great stewards of the land. So this was one of the projects.

I'm not sure if this thing's. Well, it doesn't work. There we go. Okay, so this, what, what we did is we coupled with USDA NRCS and our local mid, which is not Merced but Madera irrigation district and we did a partnership with them. And the NRCs drew up the plans. They came and did.

They came and did some of the engineering design reports. And what they discovered, if you look down, under design considerations, the amount of water that this thing, the area that we chose would take.

We chose this area because currently, at the time, it had Thompson seedless grapes that were 80 years old, and it took more water to irrigate those than we could see as a benefit and profit from our crop. So it was time to yank it. So we yanked it, and it was 20 acres there.

And then adjacent to that 20, we did an on farm recharge project with NRCS as well. So it was kind of a no brainer that this was the area. NRCs came and did their things, and they were delighted. And they called us their pilot program, because this would be one of the largest basins that they would Fund.

So we had sustainable conservation came out. We had a bunch of people came out. They came out on a tour bus. And the site behind there is where we actually had decided to do it. It's not sandy Loam, it's just straight sand. So it's a sieve going straight down.

We had to have two valve sets to be able to get across the field. That's how bad it was. So these are a few of the people that came out to visit, an M. I. D. Representative, that's my father to the right, and then Dave from NRCS.

And it was an exciting day to know that this is what we were going to go forward and do. So this was when the rains start hitting. We were like, how are we going to build this thing? Pouring rain? But we had an excavator that was delighted because he didn't have to have a water truck.

So we kept going, this is the site prior to the basin getting built. And then here we are. He start. I don't know if you can see a little bit of the angle there. It's starting to come together. And more excavation scenes here. This little bitty. zero, it did play great.

So the farm, that almond orchard you're seeing there, is not ours. That's a neighborhood. The joy of this is you're going to be putting water into an aquifer that's going to benefit more than just yourself.

It will benefit your neighbors and hopefully the people, at least the ones that I employ and that live on our land, cleaner water down the line. That's a big reason why we took this on as well. We don't get credits in our water district for doing this. We just did it. So here we are.

You can see we've got mid came in our Madera irrigation district came in and put in all the plumbing basically there, and it would start bubbling up. And there we are. We were so excited the day that that was turned on, and it just took. It took water like none other. I couldn't believe what was happening.

And not to bore you with all my fun videos. Here we are. Some more excavation with m ID. I learned a lot through this process as to the construction of these things. It's nothing. Just dig a hole and put water in it. There's a lot that goes to it.

I drove around Fresno for 2 hours trying to find rip wrap or whatever rip rock, and I was like, what am I doing here? It was not a language or a vocabulary that I was familiar with, but in doing so, learned a lot. So that's just those valves there what were irrigating the thompsons but no longer needed.

That line is. That line is still active because post this project, we coupled with NRCS again, and we are now using the water that comes down that line into. So we have surface water going into a drip system. We also worked out a project with that. So more bubbling.

It just came out and it went right back in. It took a while to get it full. Here we are, a few days into it, it's starting to fill up and more. And here we are at full well, not full capacity, but a comfortable capacity.

So we didn't have to have a ditch tender on call to make sure it didn't flood over. And then to the left, you'll see, is the on farm recharge. We had no crop planted there at that time, so we just let the water pour into there.

And this is how many acre feet we were able to take in one month. So it's 235 and change of acre feet of water within one month. And at this time, the water was free from Madera irrigation district.

So what they did, whatever the cost of the project was, they gave us a 15% credit on our Bill, our water Bill, for that particular turnout. So we used when it was free. Great. We're not tapping into that credit. Then it became $10 an acre foot. We continued to fill it. $10 an acre foot.

That'll go on for a long time. Then when we hit irrigation season, all of a sudden they said, we're going to shut you off. It's $110 an acre foot. Well, now you're talking. I don't have his dad's nice.

Mine would not allow me to put water in it to go beyond the credit, because there was a plan to on that on farm recharge side to plant ruby red grapes. So I needed that credit to irrigate that crop for as long as I could.

So the frustration here now is, how do I get water into this thing and it's affordable water? So we as a family went to a Madeira irrigation board district meeting and said, why do you not have a tiered rate system? Can't there be an irrigation water rate? Can't there be an on farm recharge rate?

We determine what magic number it is, that that's what that crop takes to. To grow, and then anything beyond that is an on farm recharge rate. And then how about a basin rate and how about that be zero? Since we're not getting credits towards anything for SGMA, for us, our GSA doesn't do that.

So I'm doing it, and we've got a lot of kickback. And I realize that's out of your hands, because now I'm understanding, after listening to the first panel, that's a local agency problem. But maybe there needs to be some push from somebody up above to let these local agencies know that farmers will do this.

They would be excited to get some of their ground out of production. It's a lot easier for me to fill a basin than it is for me to grow a crop. And it's much more beneficial, the value of water as opposed to the value of the dollar in my pocket scales are starting to tip.

It's more valuable for me to have the water because I cannot keep people employed. I can't keep my crops irrigated if they start shutting us off. So we're doing everything we can to keep water in the ground. So that's basically what's gone on on our farm. And the frustrations have been at the local level.

We were told that, you know, you, we don't have control of your base. And I said, well, you have a chain on the valve, so apparently you do, because I can't turn it on and run it when you want to. And then there was liabilities.

I said, sign a dollar lease with me and you can just use it. I'm giving you $500,000 worth of land. Just use it. And that's the, that's how our family operates. And it's not that we want the benefit, it's not going to just benefit us, it'll benefit others.

And I think more and more farmers would jump on that if there was funding available. More funding available and then some kind of guidance. I don't know what the magic plan is, but some kind of guidance to get the local agencies to come up with some. Chowchilla has free water for basins. Why can't Madeira do that?

So that's been a frustration. So it sits. It sits dry right now until we have a winter event where water is $10 an acre foot or free, we'll put it back in. We did put it in the last 24 hours because USDA and NRCs, their national level, has come out to take a look at.

My dad's over there handling that today. So they're over there. So we put a little bit in there. It killed my 82 year old father to have to spend money like that on the water. But I said, do it, dad, so they can see the benefits. So that's pretty much it for us. Thank you.

Thank you, Miss Peters, for sharing what you guys have been doing on your guys farm. Next, we'll go to Vicki Garcia Moya from Echo family farms.

Hi, everybody. Thank you for inviting me here. I'm probably the smallest farmer here, and I'm a first generation farmer, so I've kind of grown with my trees. We have an alderman orchard, 29 acres here in Chotilla. It's basically family run. My husband, my daughter.

And we do hire one person during harvest time, and we do all our harvesting on by ourselves. So we've, as I've gone through this journey, this is, like I said, my second career. So I've taken farming courses and attend any conference I can, just to learn.

So we've participated in the pilot program, and when we started, we implemented, implemented several conservation practices with NRCs. So when I was approached about the pilot program with the on farm water recharge, I was super excited. It's like, put water back on the ground. Sign me up.

So we originally tried to do a basin, but we, they said our ground wasn't appropriate for it. So then we went with on farm, and we had three applications. We're part of the Chachil water district, so we did three. We were fortunate enough to have the flood system still there.

We didn't rip it out when we switched over to micro drip and then eventually to micro drip. So all we had to do is basically dig up the valves and kind of, like, start flooding. And it was very interesting to see how the ground was taking the water.

And I think it had to do in big part because we regularly use winter cover crops, so.

And I had a feeling that it was going to go well, because when it rained, our farm, it is an hour after a big storm or rain event and the water is gone versus, like, we drive around in other orchards and the water just sits there for days.

So we were pleasantly surprised that we were able to take part in the pilot. And it was a great experience. It just takes some work. You have to monitor and be out there and open up valves and kind of see where the water flows.

But we were afraid, like, is this water going to go to the neighbors or what's it going to do? But no, it all stayed in. It would go from one row to the next row and kind of just follow the slope, I guess. So. That was nice to see.

I guess one thing I could, I would like to see in the future is possibly for those farmers that are hesitant of, you know, how it's going to affect their yield. I received, I went out and got a quote for the reverse tile. Recharge the underground pipes that you put in.

And I think I can't do it because of the cost. But it would be nice that in the future maybe NRCs can include that as one of the practices, especially if you're trying to do solar on a farm, you're going to have to put panels so you're not going to be able to farm under there.

So why not put in those reverse tiles under the solar? And so that I hope to eventually do that one day. So our experience was favorable. Like Jennifer, we don't get credits for water credits or anything like that, but the tortoise water district was charging just like $10 an acre foot.

And then eventually we were cut off because it was just for the basins. So there was, they had like a, you know, for everybody on farm, and then the basin took priority.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony, Miss Garcia Moya. Last, we'll move on to Mister Michael Clayborn or Clayborn. Excuse me.

Good afternoon, chair Soria and chair papin and Assembly Members. My name is Michael Claiborne. I'm a directing attorney with leadership council for justice and accountability. I do actually have a presentation, but as that. There it is. A couple thoughts before I jump in. The first is I'd like to compliment both chairs on the choice of venue today.

We're just down the road from Planada where we work with residents and has been discussed multiple times today. Flooded in 2023, causing pretty significant harm, displacement impacts the residents there. And like to thank chair Soria, who along with Senator Caballero championed efforts to recover from that flood.

We're also just up the road from dry domestic wells in south Merced, both dry wells and wells impacted by nitrate contamination. Now, South Merced is a community that, like, is in the outside the city limits, or part of it is.

Some of that community is served by the city's water system, and some households are served by private wells, those private wells. We've been doing outreach in that area funded by the State Water Board and well testing, and have met families with dry wells, met families with nitrate contamination who can't use their tap water.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about that convergence which really converges in south or in Merced and in the San Joaquin Valley, in places like Tuleville and Allensworth and Porterville and assemblymember Mathesis district and throughout the valley. In our view, we really can address both flood and drought in a way that better protects communities.

There's ways to do it. We're really optimistic that we can, but more needs to be done. And as chair Soria rightfully said earlier today, communities can't wait. These things need to happen faster. So with that, I'll jump in and I'll start talking about groundwater recharge and drinking water.

I almost subtitled this presentation, opportunities and risks, because that's really how we see it, and I have control of this. Okay, first, a little bit of context. So in 2012, the state recognized that access to safe and affordable drinking water is a human right. That's a codified human right.

We're not there yet in terms of actually recognizing and realizing that potential on the ground. I'm sorry, I don't know where I'm supposed to be pointing this at existing conditions in context, we still have about a million Californians who lack access to safe and affordable drinking water in their homes.

There's been, there's been a lot of progress made over the last several years on trying to address this issue.

And the State Water Board put out, and I think Governor Newsom as well, put out some data recently saying about 900,000 people have gained access to safe and affordable drinking water over the last five years or so under the safe and affordable program.

But there's still over 900,000 people served by public water systems that are failing, and a number, probably over 100,000 people, that are served by failing domestic wells and state smalls as well. Contamination, when we're talking about water quality, can be naturally occurring. It can be caused by human activity, or it can be both.

And groundwater quality regulations in the San Joaquin Valley and in other places of the state. So far aren't as effective as they need to be. We still see things like nitrate contamination increasing due to human activity and we haven't gotten a handle on that program, on that issue.

There are ongoing efforts to try to and again progress, but we're not there yet. Programs to support private well households have begun in recent years. I'm talking about the safer program in the Central Valley, also the CV Salts program, which is largely run by agricultural interests who Fund solutions.

But private wells themselves are not well regulated, not generally regulated at all once they're drilled and testing is not typically required. So households reliant on private wells often don't know what their drinking water quality is at all and maybe exposed to dangerous contaminants.

And then maybe a little aside, not quite as relevant to today's presentation, but I can't not say it. There's also no statewide affordability program and water, the cost of water for households keeps going up. So we need to address that also impacts on domestic wells and small community water systems.

The context here is that since 2013, when we started tracking this with a voluntary tool, that Department of Water Resources operates 3000 domestic wells. Almost 3000 domestic wells and drinking water wells have gone dry due to over pumping of groundwater resources.

And on the groundwater quality side, a 2012 report by UC Davis to the Legislature concluded that about a third of the wells, 33% in the south San Joaquin Valley, are impacted by nitrate contamination. So when you see domestic wells in the South Valley, very high risk of nitrate contamination. And that's true in Merced county as well.

More recent testing efforts have showed that throughout the South Valley at least, there is significant nitrate contamination, impacting 30% to 40% of wells in high risk areas. Significant threat to public health. And going back to the 2012 report, nitrate is caused for the most part, 96% is caused by application of fertilizer, both manure and synthetic, to cropland.

So two things to think about when you're thinking about groundwater recharge, where this comes into the drinking water efforts. The first is water supply. That's been most of the conversation today. I'll talk a little bit about water supply as well and opportunities that there. The second issue is water quality.

It's been mentioned a couple of times, but has not been as much of the focus. So on water supply, I think the first thing I'd like to point out is recharge can help. It's part of the solution, but it's not the only part of the solution.

PPIC looked at the San Joaquin Valley groundwater sustainability plans and concluded that as a whole, taken as a whole, these gsps are counting on way too much recharge to come into sustainability. There isn't the surface water available or the ability to get water into the ground to do as much recharge as the gsps are planning.

And the takeaway is we're going to have to do more demand reduction than those plans are included, even as we try to take advantage of every opportunity on this, on the water supply recharge side, because we should. So recharge will play a role and it can have especially localized, localized benefits.

There's a kind of picture I actually meant to put in a different picture, but this is a reference to the fairmead Groundwater resilience project that's in Madera County, and it's a project that will improve recharge near the community, which should benefit the communities to public supply wells. They only have two wells and one was having some issues.

So stabilizing groundwater supply near the community of Fairmead in a way that has multiple benefits to the aquifer as a whole and the community, I think, is a really big opportunity and an important project. In our view, recharge should be and must be community driven.

So I think in our view, community residents know their communities and the issues the best and should be able to drive these solutions, which you've heard a little bit about from others on this panel. Turning to water quality. So recharge on agricultural lands has the potential to either degrade water quality or improve water quality.

It really depends on the circumstances at the site. There was some discussion earlier about a permit that included recharge on Dairyland.

That's a concern for us because again, going back to the nitrate problem, application of dairy manure to cropland right now is occurring at unsafe levels, meaning that there is still nitrogen left in that soil that could be flushed into groundwater.

But it's very, very site dependent and we don't have all the data we need to be able to select safe sites. I'll talk a little bit about that when we get to solutions. Challenges associated with solutions once groundwater is polluted, why do we care so much about nitrate pollution?

Because it's very, very expensive to remove or to address once it's there. Once groundwater is polluted with nitrate, you do have options, but they're all expensive, they're all slow, and they're all imperfect. So, interim solutions.

I mentioned the cv salts program that offers free domestic well testing and interim drinking water solutions, usually bottled water delivery when there's a nitrate problem, that is a program that's been implemented, at least in certain called management zones for a few years. And so far those management zones have gotten to about 19% of the impacted households.

And that's after a lot of effort to do outreach tabling, get the word out about these programs. The takeaway is these are never going to be perfect. You're never going to get to 100% of impacted households with mitigation efforts, even when there are significant outreach efforts.

And then for long term solutions, you have consolidation, well, replacement, blending, treatment, extension of service. All of these take years to implement. All of these are very expensive. And again, the takeaway for me is we need to do a better job of protecting drinking water supplies in the first place before they're contaminated.

Recharge to us is not a silver bullet, but again, it's an opportunity. Sustainable groundwater management primarily requires a real commitment to demand reduction to bring actual use in line with the amount of water that's available. But recharge can help kind of on the margins.

If done properly, recharge can help communities and households maintain or regain access to safe drinking water. If done poorly, they can cause nitrate contamination and exacerbate the problem, solve a water supply problem while creating a water quality problem. That's what we want to avoid.

And then once groundwater is polluted, it's very expensive to clean up, it's very expensive to treat for drinking water uses. And then finally, emergency flood policies should not discourage advanced permitting. That was discussed a lot today. We do agree that advanced planning is better than kind of emergency action. In SB 122 and 2023.

There are a few protections that we think really need to be maintained. There's a definition of flood flow that excludes non flood events. So we're talking about the right things. Early notice of diversion to the public and the State Water Board were really important to us.

Prohibitions on flood flow, recharge to land that has potential to contaminate groundwater that's used as a drinking water source is also extremely important. And then preliminary and final reports are posted on a public website, which we appreciate. And then a few unmet policy needs from our view.

The first is monitoring and data collection related to water quality impacts of recharge. Department of Water Resources Sustainable Conservation a few others are trying to work on this. There just isn't the monitoring network to try to figure out what the impacts to groundwater quality from recharge that has occurred in the last couple of years were.

And so I think that's a significant need. More analysis and mapping of fields where it's both effective. There's been a lot of research and mapping on where recharge is effective, but also safe from a groundwater quality perspective.

There was a Bill passed authored by Senator Ashby last year, SB 659, which requires the Department to do that mapping by 2028, probably should be accelerated, but that was a positive step forward.

And then an emphasis on community driven recharge projects like the faramade projects, like a couple of projects you heard on this panel today, I think is really important. And then finally, and this is an overall takeaway, I think we need to better incorporate climate modeling into sustainable groundwater management as a General matter.

And that was my last slide. Thank you.

Thank you for your presentation. So, just in the interest of time, we're going to move on to public comment. So for those Members in the audience that would like to, you know, make a comment, there is a microphone, a podium on your left side. You can please, if you can come, you'll have two minutes.

But obviously, in the interest of time, so that we have enough folks to make their public comments, please introduce yourself. Name who you represent or what community you're from. And you can go ahead and proceed, sir.

Hello. My name is Raul Estrada. I am running for President of the United States since 2020. It's good to see everybody. Come here. Wish it was fooler to hear about our water waste. How could we better it? What cost for the life of water? If blood is, you donate blood for a pint.

If blood is a necessity to life, you take water away from the people, what happens? Farmers lose. We lose. We came here to learn something. I hope we all did. Because we need each other. From the state's level to the county level, to the city level. No matter how big it is.

There is a goal we are set to accomplish here. I'm for the agricultural side. Because that is our lifeline. That is where we get our nourishment from each and every one of you. That's why when you said that, your eyes are on them. My eyes are on you, too.

My writs that I send it to my officials each and every day is for the people. So that we don't do without to pass the buck. I say pass the envelope, push that envelope. Let's stand for something instead of just waste. All because we're not of standard. It's who you know over what you know.

But then if you mess up, that person is going to be not my problem, not my jurisdiction. As many times as you told me, some I barely met today. But I have messaged my officials each and every day for answers other than not my jurisdiction or you go to vote for me this election.

How can I take your vote from you? I see commercials that people are fighting for a reason, not for dips themselves, because we can't take it with us when we go. Greed at our state level is too high.

Thank you, Mister Estrada. That's your two minutes. Appreciate you being here. Next.

Good afternoon. Now, my name is Ryan Barrett. I live in Dos Palos on the San Joaquin River in 152.

Miss Sauria, you and I actually got to talk when supervisor Espinoza was with you in planada during the floods about highway 59 and the issue over there with the flooding going across the river, and you guys did get it cleaned up, and it does look a lot better. Where I want to go is the infrastructure is broken.

There's been no maintenance done on it. We need to start there. Also, policies are killing us. Great example is the San Luis reservoir. We're four years into that project, and we just finished phase one. They built that reservoir in 10 years.

The issues holding us up there is permits, reclamation, and they don't even have the first phase just finished up. They don't have the. They don't have the second phase awarded yet. It's our dry season.

We should be working now, not wait until January when it will be awarded, and then having to wait till April, May, because we got to release extra water out of there for public safety because they're going to be working on it. Environmental impact reports, they kill us when you get multiple for the same thing.

We need to cut that back. There needs to be more. It needs to be easier to get done. High speed rail did not need to do an environmental impact report going over the San Joaquin river. Everyone else does have to do that. That is Mickey Mouse.

So on your level, cleaning up the policies that have been in place for the last 50 years, getting them streamlined, that will make our lives a lot easier, and we can get a lot more done. Getting reservoirs built, that is a top priority to store this extra water that we lose down the San Luis reservoir.

I mean, this San Joaquin river, gathering that water, putting it in when we have it, keeping it so that we can keep the fish going upstream to Modesto and then trucking them up to the Friant. Damn, you know, during dry seasons, we just got to work on stuff like that.

Last thing real quick, Miss Payne, you said triggers an easy trigger we can set up today is we have a minimum flow going down that river. When we hit the average flow that water gets diverted and sent into the different districts. That's easy. We did it. One23.

It's steps like that, cutting out all the extra Mickey mouse and just getting the. Getting it done. We need to get it done. You guys got to run the government like a business. You are a big business. We went from the fifth largest economy down to the 7th largest economy this last year.

And now we're relying on agriculture to bring us back.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your comments.

Thank you Chair Soria and also Chair Papan and Assembly Member Mathis. Appreciate it. My name is Abraham Mendoza. I'm here on behalf of the community water center. We are headquartered in Visalia, California. I'm also a proud Central Valley resident myself. Born and raised. I come from agriculture. My grandparents are both campesinos on both sides.

So I have a deep and abiding respect for agriculture and also for the hard working people who are going out there day in and day out to help bring in money for our economy, but also just give back to the world that we live in.

For me in particular, and on behalf of the community water center, we really want to align our comments with the last presentation that leadership council provided. We personally do feel, as well as everyone else in here, that groundwater and groundwater recharge provides a lot of opportunities.

We know that in a world of climate extremes, the snowpack is melting. We understand that there are risks associated and we have to plan for the future that is hotter and drier. And groundwater recharge provides us with a really good opportunity to do just that.

However, we also understand that, as Michael mentioned, there's a lot of risks that are associated with this. On our specific work with Community Water center, we deal with community Members who their wells have run dry. We deal with people who can't drink their tap water. For similar reasons that Michael identified with leadership council.

For my personal life, I've also had to deal with contaminated water. And so we understand that this is something that also has to be managed appropriately as we deal with things like groundwater recharge and these conversations.

So in particular, we want to align our comments, focusing in on we need better planning, we need to identify where it is that these projects are suited that isn't going to create additional burdens later on when we have to come back and clean up up.

We understand that in a world where everything costs dollars and cents, we understand that the state is spending millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, regularly, either providing drinking water for people who can't access the water that they have from contamination or when their wells have run dry.

And so an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We need to be more on the front end of planning and also just making sure we have better climate modeling for these projects. Thank you.

Hi. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and all Assembly Members. My name is Angela Islas. I am a water projects coordinator with Central California Environmental Justice Network. We are based in Fresno, but we do also serve many community residents within Madera County, as well as Fresno county in General.

I know we're covering Merced, but I do also want to acknowledge assemblymember Soria, your district as well. I am supporting a small community out just a little bit outside of. They are a private domestic well community. And in General, I know that with groundwater recharge, we are really wanting to focus on the two extremes.

We are focusing on extreme flooding, but we are also focusing on extreme drought. And so on my topics, I do want to acknowledge my colleague Abram from community water center, as well as Michael from leadership council. You know, there's a lot of things that we do need to think about.

We do need to really acknowledge the high risks of what we want to acknowledge with residents. With Perry Colony, that's the community of domestic wells, just last week there was a 10th well that just went dry. So in the last two years, about a total of between eight to 10 have went dry.

And so they are looking into consolidation. That was part of Michael's presentation, that that is a consideration of option for solution.

But when we're thinking about consolidation, we also have to think about that sort of, kind of like complimentary of recharge to not impact during consolidation efforts, or even an actual well water system that is going to need to think about consolidating that community, but also the risk of their water being contaminated and having to juggle two different high expenses.

So I definitely want to just kind of put that at the table that, you know, deeply. We do also need to really think about drought because that is something that is not going to go away in this kind of timeline, that we have to try to align our policies and also align our coordination really heavily.

So appreciate the time.

Thank you.

Good afternoon Chairwoman Soria and Papan and Assemblymember Mathis. My name is Brianne Vandenberg. I am the Executive Director of the Merced County Farm Bureau, a nonprofit, grassroots, non governmental organization that advocates for farmers and ranchers within Merced county. Please let me welcome you to our county and thank you for holding a much needed hearing on groundwater recharge.

I first want to highlight an area where growers would have captured floodwater during our remarkable 2023 rain year, yet were hamstrung due to governmental challenges. As the year ramped up in flood waters, Merced county dairy farmers stepped up as they had accessible ground both in means of location to the floods pathway and tolerant crops.

The first roadblock came by way of Fish and Wildlife as they held fish screen permits for a two month period. Those same growers along with others, were again blocked from pulling flood flows under Governor Newsoms Executive order in 123.

This was due to what was explained earlier in parcel enrollment under the dairy General order or the restriction that recharge could not occur on ground that received fertilizer in the last 90 days. Agency staff felt that it would be additional leaching and nitrates, yet this overlapped with our residents still reeling from catastrophic flood damage.

We do appreciate the changes that were made or the adjustments that were made. However, we believe that this could have been completed in a quicker manner and allowed for greater acreage. On a better note, we have projects with long term benefits for our community.

The van Der Dussen Subsidence Priority Area Floodmar project stands ready for our next flood event. This project includes a 1.25 miles earthen canal from mid's El Nido Canal delivering flood water to approximately 685 acres. Approximately 325 of those are located in the sandy Mush Mutual Water Company which is a within the Merced sub basin GSA.

The remaining acreage is in the Madera County GSA with 90 days of flood flows. The 20 cubic feet per second canal will yield approximately 3600 acre feet of recharge. This project will directly benefit subsidence problems in that portion of the county.

Thank you for the time to comment today and I'd be happy to connect with you in the future should you have any questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Steve Hayes and as a point of introduction, I've been involved in California water resources challenges since calfed Bay Delta record of decision back in 2000, primarily as it related to the San Joaquin river upper Basin more recently.

Also, I should indicate I am involved with resource conservation districts tranquility on the west side of Fresno county. Also involved with an NGO called the Tulare Basin Watershed Partnership. And so the floods, waters and the impacts to some of what are called frontline communities. Allensworth, Alpaw, Corcoran, you know, they did pretty good.

I just really want to thank you for holding this joint, hearing all the panelists involved.

I think it was one of the best hearings as it relates to my 20 plus years of seeing so much of rather than half empty, much more than half full, reflecting back where we were when that rod was enacted and where we are today. I think the sideboard was sigma and formation of the gsas.

Everything I've heard today is much more opportunity based than one would imagine. I think the challenge is how to take all these opportunities. What is the toolkit from on the ground?

Those who are engaged in agriculture, some of the best institutions in the world here in the Central Valley, and create a vision just like they did one hill over called today's Silicon Valley. Biotech was brought up, but when it comes to water resources and agriculture, our economy, our way of life is based upon ag.

And since I was born here, maybe went and worked one hill over for many years, but came back, I think we need to preserve what we have. And we have that opportunity. And I think you started it today. Thank you.

Thank you. We want to think, if there's no one else in the public that wants to make comments, want to make some closing remarks very quickly. I know, just in the interest of time, allow my colleagues, if they have any other very short comments so folks, can.

I'm good.

You know, they say, you give Mathis 20 seconds, I'll talk. Don't talk. 20 minutes. They already cut me off. Give me 20 seconds. I'll talk for 30. What? I just want to thank everybody for making it out here and for the real issue that this is.

The problem with policy that I've seen over the last 10 years is we think in these utopias, we think of how good it looks on paper versus what mother Nature throws at us and the realities that we live in on paper.

It would be great to make sure that there is no contaminated water getting into our groundwater when we recharge or when we run into these flood events. The reality is that it's going to happen. The reality is that the groundwater is already contaminated from age old practices that aren't in use today.

The fact is that when it floods and levees break and dairies are flooded, it contaminates the groundwater. That's nobody's fault. It's just reality, and it happens.

So we need to stop blaming dairies and everybody else in the families that work to put food on our table at fault for it because it's very punitive and it doesn't get us anywhere and it doesn't bring people together to work as coalitions to solve the problem.

What we have to do is we have to make these regulations simpler, more flexible, where people can come together and get water in the ground faster. You know, in the military and I led hundreds of thousands of missions, millions of miles. You didn't know what was going to happen, but you knew you were going to get attacked.

You didn't know where the enemy was going to be. You didn't know where they were going to shoot at, if it was going to be a roadside bomb, an rpg. You didn't know, but you knew you were going to get attacked, so you planned for it. We know we're going to get flooded.

We know we're going to go into a drought. We have all these tools here, all of them, for decades, and we're still arguing the same points. We know better, so we need to do better. It's the same thing I tell my kids when they mess up. If you know better, do better.

This next year, these committees have the ability to do Committee bills. I expect the agencies to put some language together and say, hey, this needs to happen. We need to stop being afraid of what the Governor might say or what the Administration might say or what the Department of Finance might say.

The fact that we're talking about increasing fees yet again tomorrow, when families are simply trying to do simple things, to do the right thing, to protect communities downstream, they're saying, hey, I'm willing to take this water on. Let's do this. They got to go and pay a ridiculous amount of money just to protect somebody downstream from them.

How is that right? So I'm talking right now, bud. We had your two minutes, so we carry on. But we need to pull together as a community.

We need to pull together as a valley, and we sure as hell need to pull together as a state because we don't need to be in this same spot 10 years from now talking about the same thing. So let's pull together. Let's get this done and let's do better. Chair women, thank you for putting this together.

I'd like to thank the panelists for coming, for the community for coming, and again, pull together and get it done.

Thank you. You don't have any. Nothing? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Assembly Member Mathis and, you know, thank you for your service. I know this is your last hearing with us, and so we want to thank you for making the time today to be here.

Just want to express my gratitude again, as I mentioned earlier when we kicked off the hearing, to the Chairwoman Papin for making the drive from the bay, to be here, to hear directly one, obviously, from those in the state agencies that oversee groundwater recharge, and then also hear from our local folks and some of the folks on the ground that are doing the hard work with these projects, the ones that have taken the risk, the ones that are trying to figure it out.

You guys heard some of them are really small, just a few thousand acres that they're growing. Some are a little bit larger, but they're still trying to do their piece to not just help themselves continue to sustain this local ag economy that is so important to our community, but also at the same time helping the entire region.

And so I think today we learned, obviously, about how complicated things are, that we have made some progress, that we have some learned lessons, but that there's an incredible opportunity and that local and state folks and the federal folks also need to work together.

And I'm hoping that as I continue to be the Chairwoman of AG and have the ability to represent this region, that we continue these conversations that are so critical for the future of this region, but also of the State of California, and that we look at the funding opportunities.

I know in this last budget, there were not additional dollars for, like the Landflex program. What are we going to do together to figure out what resources we can put together if, you know, I know we put a climate bond on the ballot for November. If those funding are not there, what are the state agencies looking at?

And so we will be following up with all the regulators. Thank you for the work that you guys are doing to our academics and the professors.

I think there's an incredible opportunity here at UC Merced, especially with the farm experimental station, that we're going to have to continue to study better ways, more efficient ways, and get up to speed with even utilizing, continue to utilize AI to help our communities really not just survive, but actually thrive.

And so that's my goal as the representative of this community, to make sure that we're nothing staying in our silos, but that we're coming together to work really in a better way on behalf of everyone that we represent. So, thank you so much for making the time to be here from the morning to this afternoon.

Thank you to everyone that allowed us to put this together, especially the staff that I know spent a lot of time putting the information together and these great panels. So thank you so much all for being here. So we'll go ahead and conclude it.